Joe Paterno fired after child sexual abuse scandal

No. It really is about the culture of privilege extended to football players and athletes in America.

There's a thread on here about a highschool athlete who raped a cheerleader at his highschool. The rapist continued to be allowed to participate in the athletics programs, while the young woman was kicked off the squad for not cheering for her rapist when he took the field. So, it's nothing to do with a 'macho' image. Athletes who stick their penises in women inappropriately are also given a pass.

There's a case going on down here in Louisiana right now; an LSU football player (the quarterback, I think, but it's one of the star players), participated in a bar fight that ended up with the two victims being hospitalized with severe injuries. One of the victims was a Marine, just returned from duty in Afghanistan. By all accounts, the LSU football players instigated the fight, and ganged up on the Marine and the other victim. Yet, all the talk is about how this will affect the LSU football season, that the two victims are over-reacting, and should drop the charges. Incredible pressure is on to just sweep this whole thing under the rug.

And the privilege keeps on coming. . .

Good God. That's just awful.

I imagine that anyone who knew him back then knew that with the way he dressed, he was just asking for something like that to happen. . .

That's just beyond fucked up. Even if Sandusky cured cancer, what he did is inexcusable and I have no idea why a) people are defending him or those who protected him (ie: Paterno) and b) why people are attacking the victim for coming forward.

Makes me wonder if all these people would be acting this way if their kids or themselves had been raped. How quickly they would come to the defence of the coach if they had bee raped because the coach didn't go to the police when he first found out.

The whole situation just disgusts me.

This American Life did a show about this over the weekend, and one of the things I took away from this is the distorted view people have of football/sports in relation to college.

One of the things that came up is that the Penn State football program shows a net profit of something like $50,000,000 per year. Sounds great, until you realize that the Penn State budget is $4 Billion. The Football program supports the other sports teams . . . and that's it. And Penn State is the exception to the norm for football programs: most run a multi-million dollar deficit, which is made up by student fees.

Can someone explain to me why, on an average campus where the football program does not pay for itself, let alone other sports, the football coach is one of the highest, if not THE highest, paid individual in what is supposed to be an academic setting?

This is all part of what I see as a major wrong way of thinking in America (and I apologize for going somewhat off topic, but this has bugged me for years). Universities and colleges are, first and foremost, schools. Places of higher education, where the next generation of leaders, innovators, creators, thinkers, and doers are trained in the skills they will need so they can expand their field. In essence, all teachers are history teachers; they show what has come before, and HOW things came before, so the students can take that and build on it, instead of starting from scratch.

But, somehow, the academic side of things has become, not secondary, but third or fourth on the list of priorities for universities. Higher Education, even public Higher Education, has become a for-profit business, and the football team is the marketing department. Students/customers are lured by images of football helmets and trophies, even when they're trying to get into the science majors. Alumni are enticed to give money, not with discussions about expanding the library network or showcasing writing talent, but with skybox tickets.

Football players are being used, not for their skills, but for their marketability. When they should be studying for finals, they are making required media opportunities, shaking hands with Santa or opening the mall on Black Friday. Their education is of no concern to the school; their eligibility is, which is why you keep running into players who have already graduated, but still have one more year of playing time available.

When a school needs to make budget cuts, it sure isn't the football program, monetary drag that it usually is, that gets cut. No, it's professors. Teachers. The people who make a university a university. At my school, when the cuts came around, the English department, which has each and every student at the college for at least 3 classes, lost 2 full-time positions. The entire athletic department lost one student trainer position. They had to give up a water-carrier.

The skewed priorities of the University system make it no surprise that people went apeshit over Paterno (asshole) getting fired.

If you want to see how much more important athletics are to US post-secondary institutions, compared to their counterparts around the world, just look at the amount of athletic scholarships vs. academic scholarships they give out. It's kind of crazy how many more athletic scholarships are given out compared to other universities around the world.

My cousin goes to a rather prestigious US university on a hockey scholarship, which she was offered when she was in the middle of grade 11. It wasn't based off of marks or anything, it was just that she is an amazing player (and she is, she's on the Team Canada Junior team). What my family actually finds funny is that there is only 3 or 4 US players on that team and the rest are Canadian....but they didn't get the scholarships because their great in school, they got it for their hockey skills.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but you're right. In the current (2011/12) school year my alma mater awarded the first athletic scholarships ever offered by any local university - and they only gave out five.

Well said.

Somewhere, many decades ago, they forgot about the "student" part of the "student-athlete" paradigm.

I completely agree with your overall point (and I currently work in an office that is directly next to a top-10 football program's stadium), but you're missing what they also brought up on that episode: the 50 million is only the money directly brought in by the university, and not the additional money that having a top program brings in, including higher enrollment, larger donations (from donors principally interested in the university-as-football-team), so the 50 million is somewhat misleading as a number.

But, yes, your overall point stands. I'd like to stick up for athletes and athletics in general, but it's not easy to do in a thread like this and probably wouldn't be welcomed.

That's why I called football programs the marketing department for university businesses. But I should have expanded that part.

I have no problem standing up for the student athletes. They're being used as much as anything. I don't know what the percentage is of college athletes who are able to use what they really studied (their sport) after college, but it can't be very large. Very few go pro, more go into coaching, but what about the rest? At best, they received an abridged education, with all the mandatory absences. At worst, they're handed a degree they didn't earn.

Let's also remember that this case doesn't involve a student athlete doing anything wrong and that the vast majority of athletes, student or professional have never committed a crime, let alone one as heinous as the ones the adult Sandusky is accused of. In fact, several (sugar ray and theo fleury come to mind) have been victims of sexual abuse by coaches.