CSotD: A matter of institutional control
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This Clay Jones cartoon ran in the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, VA, Monday. As of yesterday, he reported on Facebook, they were up to 18 hate letters, two cancellations and "a couple" of letters to the editor protesting the piece.
It's not a perfect takedown on the events at the end of Paterno's career: According to the grand jury report, he did report what he had been told the "very next day" after being informed of it by the graduate student.
But most cartoonists are avoiding the topic entirely, while others are drawing the tributes without mentioning the stain. Jones is the only one I've seen so far who acts like a journalist.
ESPN's Rick Reilly's positive take on Paterno's legacy is an unintentional indictment of the way the scandal was handled. Reilly tells of how Paterno made weekly visits to a seriously injured player and continued to support him after he had regained use of his legs, encouraging him to go to law school.
Which is great and is an example of why Paterno was so loved by his players and others around him. But it makes you wonder, if he could invest that much time and interest in one kid, why he failed to follow up on behalf of the other.
The way the law is written in Pennsylvania, Paterno was not a "mandated reporter" because he did not deal with minors in his job. And, even if he were, the law does not require a report to police. He would have fulfilled his obligation by reporting to his superior, as the graduate assistant did by reporting to him.
Sort of.
It appears that Paterno may have been overly vague about what had been seen. I say "appears" because the two men to whom he reported it told the grand jury he wasn't clear about actual sexual contact between Jerry Sandusky and the boy, but said they were "fooling around."
However, the grand jury also reported that they did not find the testimony of those men credible.
But Paterno's own remarks since made it appear that he wasn't sure what the assistant had seen, and it strains credulity to imagine that he wouldn't have asked more questions at the time, if he were more interested in protecting the kid than in protecting the program.
Rescinding Sandusky's lockerroom privileges suggests he knew the report was serious. Failing to follow up on it suggests that he felt it was sufficient to get it away from the program.
At the heart of the NCAA rule book is a concept called "institutional control."
It's a concept with broad applications in life.
What it means is that the people in the chain of command, beginning with the university president and going down to the athletic director and coaches, are expected to know what is going on in their sports programs and to take responsibility for it.
They — the great indefinite "they" — say that no Division I program is clean, and that's likely true if you take an absolutist view.
When I was at Notre Dame, I had a couple of occasions where I bought football tickets from players, which is an NCAA violation. But I was buying them from personal friends at face value. As I recall, a player who suited up got four tickets, a reserve got two. Face value was $6.50 each.
This is not the same thing as a player getting 20 tickets and scalping them for five or six times face value to virtual strangers. It's not plausibly deniable to hand a kid 20 tickets every week and think he's using them so his family can watch him play.
Similarly, I remember being in town one evening when a couple of guys from the basketball team pulled up in the coach's car. That's a violation.
But it's a violation because, at some schools, the coaches would own a half dozen or more new sports cars and would allow star players to borrow them for, oh, the year. In this case, it really was the coach's car, right down to the box of Kleenex on the rear deck.
I would have trouble reporting that to Shawnee Mission with a whole lot of righteous horror.
And I have since heard of star players getting handshakes from alumni after games in which some folded bills were passed. It happens. But a friend who, after playing at ND, went on to law school elsewhere and would work out with the undergrad athletes there was horrified at the level of illegal compensation they received and the blatancy with which they received it.
I believe Penn State has operated on as clean a level as ND in my time, and I think Paterno took the responsibility for seeing that it did.
You can't keep a program 100% squeaky-clean. But you have to exercise institutional control, and it's fair for the NCAA — or anyone, really — to come back and say, "You could not have been unaware of this" when things have gone rogue.
Having a graduate assistant — and, in this case, someone you've known since he was a kid — come to your house on a Sunday morning to tell you of something he saw that upset him ought to bring up a greater level of concern than a quick report the next day and a decision to keep the offending ex-coach away from campus.
If you believe it, you have to do more.
If you don't believe it, why ban the guy from the lockerroom?
And if, as some of his remarks suggest, he was a confused old man who didn't understand what he was being told, who left him in charge of a multi-million dollar football program?
It is an element of institutional control.
Somewhere — though not somewhere I can find it at the moment — I have a cartoon of LBJ, drawn after his death in 1973. He is in a robe, flying upward to the clouds, his progress hobbled by a large stone around his neck labelled "Vietnam."
For all his good work in the area of civil rights, for all his attempts to help the poor, LBJ is remembered for that war.
And Benedict Arnold was the hero of Saratoga, the battle that halted Burgoyne's invasion and turned the Revolution in favor of the rebels. That legacy became tarnished by afterevents, to say the least.
And legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes is remembered for his last act: Slapping a Clemson player in the middle of a game on national television.
That's how history works.
It's why you should always wear clean underwear, and exercise institutional control.
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