I am deeeeffffinitely not here to stick up for JoePa. Or PSU.
This is my problem. My facebook feed is just absolutely full of PSU stuff alllll the time and has been for years. A LOT of PSU alumni are just unwilling for the school or football team (and CERTAINLY not JoePa) to take ANY blame. They just completely deny that the school should have been punished. It's actually hard to sort out.
I just need some sort of non PSU reality check.
It seems the PSU main contentions are something like....
PSU didn't have a culture problem at any level and doesn't now. A few guys made some mistakes perhaps out of ignorance or well meaningly. Sandusky fooled the whole world for many years and these guys aren't investigators.
McQueery wasn't the most trustable guy (I find this argument absurd).
JoePa did exactly what he was supposed to do, which was put it in the hands of his superiors almost immediately, get out of the way, and let them do their job. What he did is exactly what the NCAA now recommends all employees do. (Technically true, but at least slightly self serving). JoePa never got due process and now the world is free to take shots at him because he's dead.
The Freeh report is totally bogus from top to bottom. You can't trust Freeh to pour a glass of water let alone do a report like this. The entire report was just the BOT cyaing and he was paid to do that and that alone. It wasn't about the truth. He didn't even interview the people involved.
The NCAA punishments were just about taking money from PSU and they themselves have had to admit they bluffed and probably didn't have jurisdiction. We're gonna get the money and the wins back.
The only reason the rest of the world gets the sense that PSU has admitted blame is because the BOT is so dysfunctional that they backed down as quickly as possible, largely to avoid the football death penalty. In the chaos that ensued it was very difficult to ascertain any truth, and rather than try to find it there was just a rush to judgement.
That is the bubble I have been living in for years now. Does the rest of the world buy any of these arguments? I do think the BOT is full of liars that knew about this way ahead of time. I do think the Freeh report should be strongly questioned. I do think the NCAA is dysfunctional and used this as an opportunity to bolster themselves and grab some cash, as did the Big Ten. I am still waiting for various law suits to sort some of this out.
But I still think people have to go to jail for what they did and didn't do. Stories don't add up. I thought the rest of the world had generally settled on a version of "PSU fudged up. Got caught. Got a fair punishment".
But did I miss something? Is the rest of the world coming around to PSU's line of thinking? I went to an MSNBC poll the other day and like 96% of thousands of people thought JoePa should get his wins back. I couldn't believe that.
What is the evolving public perception of all this now?