Former Penn State football players have taken a serious step towards the defense of their former coach Joe Paterno with what they call a letter, but what feels like an actual petition.
The idea of the letter is to defend Joe Paterno and the Penn State community from taking the black eye from the Jerry Sandusky situation. This looks to be the first step in the process of recapturing the stature the school had before this scandal.
While many will say this notion is not the right way to go about this, the amount of lives Paterno touched in his decades as one of the figureheads of Penn State as an institution cannot be ignored.
It is understandable that people want someone to pay immediately for crimes against children especially, but Paterno was being lumped in with Sandusky in the moment and that’s where things went too far. All of the good things that were done can and should NOT be ignored.
The truth will be determined in court about whether or not Paterno was in the wrong, but he did exactly what he was supposed to with the situation he was handed. The ex-players who signed this petition know that Paterno played things by the book, but everyone makes mistakes.
The former athletes who played under Paterno hope that this letter will show that the community is still alive and thriving and that it is more than one sport and more than one man.
This is a healing process for not only the alleged victims of Sandusky's madness, but for the people who call Penn State home and wear the colors as if they were their own. Those people lived and breathed Nittany Lions over the years, and now it has all become clouded.
No matter what Paterno's athletes from past and present do to defend their school in this case will be looked down upon, so they need to just worry about making themselves feel better. That started with aiding victims of abuse, and now it's time to start rebuilding the great community the college has.
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