[ArtMonkDrillz]

Originally Posted by djnemo65

Haven't you noticed that no one is bashing the janitor who failed to report Sandusky? That guy certainly was a Joe Schmoe. The whole point of this Scandal vis-a-vis Paterno was that in failing to take decisive action Paterno fell short of the moral standard and example he had set for himself and the university, even if he had obeyed the law. He was and should have been held to a higher standard. But where did that standard come from? Well, it come from the way he had lived his life, and to just pretend that he didn't have a profoundly positive impact on thousands of football players and hundreds of thousands of students is to completely miss why Paterno's involvement in this was a news story in the first place. So while the last two months aren't forgotten and forgiven just because he died, it's perverse to just blindly deny all the positive things he accomplished in his life. Anyway, human beings - including Paterno - are genuinely complex, and rarely the type of unambiguously good/evil characters we see in movies like Star Wars. Unless these people are named NC_Skins or Firstdown, in which case they are unambiguously irritating beings who have been sent to this world solely to annoy me with their insensitive and ill-considered posts.

Very well said. The main reason I said "it's sort of sad" in the initial post is for the exact reasons you pointed out. While he went out with a severely tarnished legend due to his inaction regarding the piece of garbage, Sandusky, it's hard to discount the fact that he gained that legendary status based on more than just wins.