The Lions' Pride

Although I agree with you that there are other issues of greater importance in my life and our society than football scholarships and bowl bans, however this is a bigger issue than football scholarships and bowl bans.

There are several HUGE societal issues going on here...

1) The media can destroy a person without any proof whatsoever.

2) The gov't/people in power can destroy a person without any proof. Freeh has done this with Paterno, Richard Jewel, Bin Hammam (Fifa soccer guy), and Wen Ho Lee. Freeh couldn't find anything on Wen Ho Lee in order to save face the gov't made up a new law retroactively to find Lee guilty of something.

3) Our notion of innocent until proven guilty/due process. Many levels here. Paterno was labeled as guilty without even a chance to defend himself. The NCAA showed no care about due process or fairness. No one gave Paterno the benefit of the doubt he earned by doing such great things for 61 years. One can argue due process doesn't apply in the court of public opinion or private associations but without it fairness goes out the window.

It is of great concern to me that these things were allowed to happen. It shows if you cross the wrong people they can destroy you. We as a society are going down a very bad path with this. Anyone who says this stuff doesn't matter, wait until they or someone they love is wrongly accused of something and they have absolutely no shot of "proving" they didn't do it. We now have to prove we didn't do something instead of the accuser proving we did. This is a very very dangerous slope.

That's why I care about football scholarships and bowl bans.

1) Duh
2) Freeh would claim he had proof. Furthermore, Freeh never claimed nor intended his document to be a legal one. It is an internal report that the insitution chose to take at face value and release to the public.
3) Joe Paterno never had a violation of due process. He was never legally charged with anything, he was never criminally punished, nothing. His firing did go through due process, they held the meeting and fired him. I don't care for how it was delivered, but the process itself was legal.

You're basically arguing that the public shouldn't have its own opinions. This involved kids, it was never a win situation for anyone involved. While I support Joe for being an outstanding football coach and mentor to his players, and will continue to support the fact that he never committed a crime, I know better than to think public opinion would have turned out any other way.

Still crazy to this day that more people don't see the grandstanding done by Kelly, Surma, Peetz, Freeh, etc.....

If MM never said he saw "anal rape" in the shower then how could she have gotten away with that during the first pc? Again, that was the line that almost every news outlet ran with...and almost every person talked about.

"The 10 year old boy in the shower", heck even Corbett on conference call said "remember the 10 year old boy"

It is what the media ran with and in the end isn't what happened that night.