Don't Go Big Red

Someone should have the decency to pull the plug on this game. If Penn State won't, or can't, Nebraska should.

Reasonable people will disagree, and I have gone back and forth on this question myself the last couple of days, as I'm sure others have. I may change my mind yet again.

But let's review:

-- Some 36 hours ago students -- some of them morally obtuse, some drunk, some avoiding homework, some just plain stupid -- rioted in support of a man who enabled the worst kind of child abuse to occur on his watch, in his workplace, by a close friend and longtime employee. A man who a week ago was one of the most admired men in all of sports, which, by definition, made him one of the most admired men in America. Joe Paterno is a good man whose sins here are of omission, not commission, but if I hear one more sports commentator or read one more columnist speculating on how this affects Paterno's "legacy," I will scream. This is the first line of his obituary. Not his record 409 victories. Period. This is tragic for Paterno, to be sure, and certainly there's room in our hearts for some compassion for him. But he is not the victim, or even a victim. He's a perpetrator.

-- The Penn State Board of Trustees acted with resolve and courage in ridding the university of its coach and president but abjectly failed in this respect: It did not fire the one man who we know, by his own grand jury testimony, had a chance to literally stop this monster -- sorry, alleged monster -- in his tracks and, almost certainly, save more children from similar abuse. In fact, the board was willing to let this man coach Saturday -- a man who turned his back on a child being sexually abused, who abandoned him to his tormentor, who had to call his daddy to figure out what to do and whose daddy didn't have a clue either. How is it possible not to know what to do in such a situation? Again, we know all this by HIS OWN sworn testimony, and yet the university was willing to let him come to work Saturday before a national television audience until it changed its mind late Thursday in the face of death threats against this moral midget.

-- The Penn State community -- students, faculty, alums, people who live in State College -- are victims in their own way of this evil. We grieve for them, wish them well in their recovery and we know, or should know, that there but for the grace of God go we. But rest assured, there will be some among the 106,000 in that stadium Saturday who knew for years what Sandusky was up to, or at least suspected enough, heard enough whispers, to have taken action. Some will be on the Penn State sidelines coaching, others in the rarefied air of the skyboxes far above the field. They. knew.

-- There's more to come. We know that, right? Fresh rumors already are circulating about Sandusky's behavior. I won't spread them here, but they're easily found on the Internet. The stories are unspeakably vile and salacious and, if you can imagine it, dwarf the depravity of which we've heard all week. These rumors are frankly unbelievable. Yes, just as unbelievable as what we now know would have been a mere week ago.

-- The first, albeit still lonely, suggestions are being offered that Penn State should shut its football program down, at least for a year or two, to begin cleansing itself of its sins.

-- Meantime, you know there are executives at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., rubbing their money-grubbing hands together in glee at the likelihood Saturday's game will be their highest-rated telecast of the season, if not ever, because after all, at the end of the day, that's all that really matters. Millions will tune in, not to see a football game, but for a goddamn freak show, in hopes something, anything, might happen to slake their thirst for spectacle, the more awful the better.

I'm a proud Nebraskan, Husker fan and university employee, but I’d rather see the Huskers submit to another dope-slapping at the hands of Texas than to be a participant in this freak show.

So, let's not. Let's take a stand, on principle, and not show up for this game. I'm not quite sure what that principle is, as this story is so fluid and ever-shifting and the identities of villains, of various culpabilities, are still evolving (and, yes, they are due some benefit of the doubt, etc. etc.).

As a general rule, it's unwise, even foolish, to take a stand on principle if one cannot clearly articulate it. So, how about something like this:

Unspeakable evil occurred here; it was committed in the name of this sport we are about to play, enabled by it. This is not the place, this is not the day, to play this game.

No doubt Nebraska would be a laughingstock in some corners of college football for such a move. But given the increasingly tawdry moral state of big-time college athletics, what of it?

Don't Go Big Red.