Not very many coach can equal what Joe Paterno is doing. He has been the headcoach for a single team for 41 years. He is one of the winningest coaches in the history of college football. He is 80 years old and wants to coach few more years.
College Football is now a multi billion dollar industry and winning is so important that coaches would cut slack on their star players when criminal and drug charges would be brought against them. That is the norm for most of the coaches. Not Joe Pa.
Players of Penn State football team were invlolved in a off campus brawl. Criminal proceding is going on against several players. Coach Paterno didn't wait for the ruling. He made is own judgement and punished the whole team. Not the individual who was intially involved and then called others to back him up. This is a statement to all coaches who are goody goody to their players and punish them to spent more time in the weightroom or run extra laps everyday. That only helps the player does not hurt them.
"In a coaching business so full of phonies who talk character only to bend the rules, who consider the definition of discipline a player's weight-room attendance, who wouldn't dare pull something like this because it might hurt recruiting, here's Joe Pa, four decades on the job and not giving a damn." the article says.
The article continues to say,
"Who was right and who was wrong still is being sorted out by the judicial system. Not by Paterno, of course. The details don't seem to matter to him. Rather than figure out which individuals did what, who arrived when, he decided to hammer the entire team, if for nothing less than lacking the leadership to stop the incident from getting out of hand.
On college campuses where football stars often are treated to a lower standard, Paterno is going, once again, for a higher one.
"I just thought that, hey, we had 14, 15 kids – I don't even know how many – that were involved in something embarrassing, and I think that we need to prove to people that we're not a bunch of hoodlums," he said.
The entire team also will have to build a house for Habitat for Humanity and volunteer for the Special Olympics this summer. But the worst punishment no doubt will be cleaning up Penn State's mammoth 107,282-seat stadium.
A job usually left for others now will be done by Penn State's multimillion-dollar football team. Paterno can't see how this is any different. All the kids on campus are the same, so if the rugby team can find the energy to clean the stadium, so can his guys.
"I don't condone (the fight)," Paterno said. "Our kids were wrong."
And across the nation college football coaches faint.
Most coaches have spent their offseason complaining about not being able to text butt-kissing messages to recruits. They no sooner would wear out their players on an off-day with garbage picking than give up their country club memberships.
At too many places in college football, the kids never are wrong. Punishments often are things that actually help the team: more running, early-morning weightlifting. It is rarely public, rarely embarrassing and never, at least to my knowledge, a blanket shot across the entire team, a true call for leadership and shared values.
But this is why Joe Paterno is Joe Paterno
He isn't worried about hurt feelings. He isn't worried about potential recruits. He isn't worried about guys sacking garbage on Sunday morning.
He's worried about the reputation of his players, his program and his school. He's worried about cleaning things up immediately, starting with the stadium."
http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news;_...yhoo&type=lgns
figuratively the players will take out the trash of over 100,000 people.
Joe Pa is the man.