I haven’t read Joe Posnanski’s entire biography of Joe Paterno yet, but I was really struck by this section of the excerpt published in GQ:

On Monday, the family tried to persuade Paterno to read the presentment. He objected that he already knew what was in there, but they told him there was no room left for illusion. D’Elia would remember telling him, “You realize that the people out there think you knew about this? They think you had to know because you know about everything.”

“That’s their opinion!” Paterno shouted. “I’m not omniscient!”

“They think you are!” D’Elia roared back.

Later, D’Elia described watching Paterno read the presentment: “What did he know about perverted things like that? When he asked Scott, ‘What is sodomy, anyway?’ I thought my heart was going to break.”

One of the consensuses around Penn State seems to have been that, Sandusky or no Sandusky, Paterno stayed on as head coach longer than he should have. That quotation alone is a reminder that, for all that we praise old-fashioned values, there can be willful ignorance or dangerous squeamishness that goes along with being old school. If you want to lead, especially on a college campus, and maybe especially if you’re running an athletic program, you really can’t afford to be delicate about sex. The world changes, and you can’t hold it back or close your eyes to it.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on whether the statue of Joe Paterno standing outside Penn State’s football stadium should stand or fall, and I find the competing arguments — that it should be immediately removed or that it should stand, at least for a little while, as a shameful reminder of Penn State’s mass institutional failure — interesting and compelling in their own right. There are conflicting reports about whether the statue is coming down this weekend, but either way, this latest protest is another shameful chapter in an ongoing series of them for the university and its students:

A group of Penn State students have started a vigil intended to protect the Joe Paterno statue from vandals.

Seniors Mike Elliot and Kevin Berkon formed the group after they saw a plane fly over the campus earlier this week displaying a banner that read: “Take the statue down or we will.”

Clearly, at least for some students, the necessary realignment of Penn State’s cultural priorities that should have taken place after this scandal hasn’t yet happened. It’s enough to make you wonder if any of this would have been necessary had anyone in State College rushed to defend Jerry Sandusky’s victims with the same vigor these students have for defending a man whose reputation was shattered long before his statue will be.

After a swift decline in his health, former Penn State coach Joe Paterno passed away this morning at 85. I’ll be thinking of his family, but his death is a tragedy in that it cuts short what could have been a process of education and seeking forgiveness. If Paterno had lived, and had been lucid enough to come to terms with his abdication of responsibility; if he had sought forgiveness for it and worked to help other programs become safer, more responsible and responsive organizations, he could have made a contribution to coaching far beyond his work elevating the Nittany Lions into a nationally competitive program.

Maybe he would have done none of those things had he lived, out of denial or a lack of capability. But his death forecloses an opportunity, however slight, to make recompense, and to remind the students who still saw him as a deity that there are more important things than football.

The bridge is yours.

-Me. Maureen Ryan. Ryan McGee. Todd VanDerWerff. Homeland. Parks and Recreation. You know what to do.

-Some of the best television lines of the year.

-Brave‘s fired female director talks Belle, her daughter as inspiration, and her split with Pixar.

-Super-cute Game of Thrones house banners.

-Art, healing, and the Happy Valley.