A Footbal Scandal?

Trey Smith

It is the football culture. Bigger, actually, because this doesn't end at the goal line. But it was an adored former defensive coordinator who currently sits in a 6-foot by 8-foot cell today, convicted of child sexual assault, who provided the tipping point. He was aided by an adored former boss who, incredibly, wrote "this is not a football scandal."

Pathetic. It is a football scandal because football was valued over all in sheltering, protecting and enabling a child molester. That was the epic conclusion of the Freeh Report. Penn State's top administrators, the boss' bosses, essentially took their orders from that head football coach.

"There's more red flags," Freeh said, "than you could count."

Not a football scandal? Ask yourself if Jerry Sandusky had been a chemistry professor, would his acts been ignored by the dean of the school? Meanwhile, in the Penn State football building janitors were afraid to report a witnessed felony because they didn't want to lose their jobs.

"If that's the culture at the bottom," Freeh said, "God help the culture at the top."

Not a football scandal?
~ from Let Freeh's Damning Report Ring -- King Football Needs To Answer For Sins by Dennis Dodd ~

When I first sat down to write this post, I had a different thesis in mind. My initial inclination was to say that this is not a football scandal per se; it was a scandal of the powers that be. The Sandusky affair, like so many others, was about protecting the brand name to keep the money flowing. It was about how elites live in a different world than the rest of us and how "justice" is different in these two worlds.

That was the post I intended to write.

I changed my mind. It's not that I don't believe any of the things written above are untrue -- far from it. It's more that I realized that the Sandusky crimes and the coverup by Penn State's top brass is more than a football or a power-hungry elite scandal; it's an all too familiar human scandal.

In our own ways, all of us are guilty of the same sins. We protect our family, our company, our social group, our belief system or our own image at all costs. If something occurs that calls our integrity into question, most of us most of the time will circle the wagons.

We want the rights and perks this life has to offer, but we shy away from the responsibilities and we certainly don't want any of the blame. When things go well, we demand to be singled out for the utmost praise. When things go poorly or worse, we want to be a face lost in the crowd and whine if a finger is pointed directly at us.

This is not to excuse the shenanigans that went on at Penn State for over a decade that allowed a pedophile to victimize young boys again and again. This is not to excuse a legendary football coach and top school administrators for placing the university's legacy and profit-generating abilities over the health and welfare of children.

It is to say that, if we are frank and honest, what happened at Penn State happens in our own lives routinely. Usually the stakes aren't so high and it has nothing to do with the sexual victimization of children, but the same acts and pattern are, unfortunately, ubiquitous in human society.

Yes, college football needs to clean up its act, but so do the rest of us.