The Chris Moeller Archives

It should be a foregone conclusion now that the Penn State football team would get the death penalty from the NCAA in the wake of today's release of the Freeh Report. Despite claims by the Joe Paterno family that there are no new facts revealed with this 267-page document, we actually now know...

-Head coach Paterno knew about formal child rape allegations against assistant Jerry Sandusky in 1998, four years before the shower rape witnessed by an assistant coach. On a bizarre side note, we have confirmation that Paterno wasalso lying when he said in a hearing that he had never heard of a man being raped.

-A year later, in '99, Paterno wanted a retiring Sandusky to stay on the payroll as "Volunteer Position Director- Positive Action for Youth" (a retroactively-hilarious job title). According to emails between the president and the athletic director at that time, "Joe did give (Sandusky) the option to continue to coach as long as he was the coach." Then Sandusky received a lump-sum $168,000 retirement payment from the university president.

-In '01, Penn State's president and AD wanted to go to the police, but changed their minds after a meeting with Joe Paterno. Of course we don't know what was said at that private meeting, but I would be curious to hear anybody's alternative to my admittedly-bold hypothesis: that Paterno told them to drop it.

-Joe Paterno did know how to use email and used it. His family is lying when they claim he didn't.

-Penn State officials failed to comply with federal law for two decades. A piece of federal legislation called the Clery Act requires university officials to report incidents concerning sexual assault to the university police department for the purpose of publishing such statistics for public access.

Despite this 13-year, institutional conspiracy to hide the child raping crimes of the second-in-command of the varsity football team, Penn State still might avoid the death penalty, presumably because they managed to avoid more severe crimes like giving money to their players for laundry.

Selfishly, I'm a little pissed about having been dragged into this whole thing. A couple years ago, my cable TV and internet provider began saddling me with the Big 10 Network. Now, upwards of one-third of my monthly cable bill will probably go towards paying off civil and criminal lawsuits against a state university with a $4.6 billion budget and a $1.8 billion endowment.

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a) "I have absolutely no recollection of that football game."

b) "What the fuck is an ESPY?"