Fowler: Paterno must retire

CHARLOTTE -- Imagine it was your child.

Imagine it was your son, or your grandson, or some other 10-year-old you cared about.

And then the Penn State scandal will sink in a bit more deeply, the one that must force coach Joe Paterno into retirement. It is a case where one person after another - including Paterno - punted a deeply disturbing allegation to someone else.

Meanwhile, nothing was really getting done. And a former Penn State defensive coordinator named Jerry Sandusky was free to be - if these allegations are true - a child molester. A monster of the worst kind.

This is not a sports story. This is a story about a lack of judgment and a lack of human decency.

In March 2002, a Penn State graduate student told legendary football coach Paterno that he had witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in the football facility's showers.

Paterno did not go to the police - and wouldn't you have wanted him to if that was your son? I have a 10-year-old son, and so these allegations make me sick - and angry - on a lot of levels.

Paterno talked to the university's athletics director instead.

Amazingly, no one went to the police. Not Paterno, not the grad student, not the athletics director. They apparently just told Sandusky not to bring any more children on campus.

Sandusky - who was retired by then from football but who still ran a charity for disadvantaged youth and had the run of the Penn State football facility - was free to commit more acts of abuse elsewhere, which Pennsylvania prosecutors allege he did.

Sandusky, 67, was arrested Saturday and charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year period.

During some of that time he was an assistant at Penn State, where he worked for Paterno for 32 years and once was considered his heir apparent.

By reporting the incident to his athletics director, Paterno, 84, legally seems to have done the bare minimum required.

But morally, what he did was not even close to the bare minimum. It was not nearly enough.

Paterno, the head coach at Penn State for 46 years, has done a whole lot of good in his life. He's won a lot of football games - 409 of them, more than any other major-college coach - in the place called Happy Valley. He has long and affectionately been considered a throwback with his big black glasses, his knotted tie, his rolled-up pants and his professorial appearance.

But his time has come and gone. By not responding appropriately to such a stunning charge, Paterno has shown himself to be either way out of touch, or way too loyal, or way too worried about the Penn State brand being sullied, or way too sure that someone else was going to do the right thing so he didn't have to deal with it.

Of course, Sandusky is the one who is charged with these heinous crimes, not Paterno. If they are true, Sandusky deserves a special place in hell.

But those who knew and failed to act - Paterno, the athletics director and others - might have allowed more children to be harmed by Sandusky. And that's just unconscionable.

Paterno should lose his job over it, as should Penn State President Graham Spanier.

There is no joy in calling for Paterno's career to end badly, for the beloved "JoePa" not to get the sort of royal sendoff that Dean Smith has received at North Carolina.

Paterno's teams didn't cheat. His players graduated. He won two national championships in the 1980s (both with Sandusky calling the shots on defense and helping Penn State establish its reputation as Linebacker U).

But Paterno's motto at Penn State, "Success with Honor," rings hollow today. His image has been tarnished, as has his school's.

The coach had a moral obligation to do more than he did when he heard the eyewitness account about Sandusky's abuse. And because he didn't, he must go.