Former Penn State Players Need to Stop Criticizing Freeh Report

Former Penn State players, Franco Harris,  Rudy Glocker and Christian Marrone are passing around a letter for other athletes to sign, criticizing the Freeh Report as being "highly flawed and factually insufficient."  They plan to publish the letter in The Wall Street Journal and other large publications.  But if they truly want to help Penn State, they need to throw that letter in the trash. 

 That is, Harris, a former Pittsburgh Steeler and member of the Football Hall of Fame, and his cronies  are carting around sandwich boards framed in blinking neon lights, which everyone can read but themselves.  The message is "Football before Honor; So What if  Paterno Turned His Back on Pedophilia." No amount of evidence would have been sufficient to convince them of what they did not want to know.   Whether one calls what Paterno and the Penn State experience endowed them with "cultural brainwashing", or plain old "moral blinders,"  it was not the kind of education most American parents would pay for their college-aged kids to receive.  I am convinced that Paterno's mention in the Freeh Report is merely a psychological trick.  It is used to gauge how much damage Penn State's football culture did to the minds and souls of those who passed through its gates.   For this scandal was not at its core about a football coach.  It was rather about defenseless ten year old boys being sexually molested in the locker room showers, while seemingly decent men, stood back and did nothing.  


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