I saw the story on ESPN and I thought Paterno was in denial. Maybe some of the charges were dropped, but there is no doubt that Penn State football players have been having some MAJOR disciple problems. He even accused the ESPN reporter of being on a "witch hunt." I like Paterno, but someone needs to nudge Joe and wake him up. To me, he seemed to be downplaying the problems.
As mentioned earlier, maybe some of the charges were dropped, but where's there's smoke, there's fire. No two ways around it, Penn State has had some major discipline problems in the last few years.
I am not trying to downplay our own problems in the last year or so. I don't like some of the off the field incidents with our football players. There's no doubt that when you have that many 18 to 22 year old young men together on a team, you are going to have off the field issues. I feel like we'll see fewer problems like this at Alabama with some of the kids CNS is recruiting.
Maybe we don't hear about it nearly as much because we are so far away from Penn State, but Alabama would have been crucified by the media had we had that many arrests over the same time frame.
Paterno seemed to me to be living in a world of rainbows and lolipops. If I were a Penn Sate fan I would have wanted to see a much stronger reaction from Paterno concerning his football players during the interview. Instead he seemed to be downplaying it to me.
As I said, I like Paterno, but I 've felt for some time that he should give it up and move on. He's done a great job at Penn State, but he should have retired four or five years ago IMO.