I don't know about you, but I dragged myself out of bed at 9:30 yesterday morning to watch ESPN's Outside the Lines piece on Penn State Football's off-the-field problems and I have to agree with JoePa on this one, it kinda comes off as a "witch hunt." But, that seemed obvious months ago when they contacted me for the piece.

I told you before that I was contacted by Steve Delsohn (as were a number of other people) looking for information for this piece back in April. One of the e-mail exchanges from Delsohn read: "The story is about the Penn State football program and its string of off-the-field incidents. We are looking for a Penn State professor or administrator who is concerned about all this, and might be willing to say so publicly...and I was just wondering if you had encountered anyone like that on campus." So, that was their angle all along.

If you haven't seen the piece you can check it out here, or tune into ESPN at 3pm today, Tuesday or Wednesday and judge for yourself. Btw, the best part of the entire video comes about a minute in when Joseph McGarrity, who lived in the apartment where the notorious Meridian Melee occurred, does his best Rick Flair impression. Priceless.

Clearly JoePa was not happy to be sitting across from ESPN's Steve Delsohn and responding to his questioning. In fact, it's pretty surprising Paterno even agreed to it since he rarely does one-on-one interviews anymore, especially given the subject matter.

Essentially, the piece was what I had expected: a bunch of players have been charged with crimes over the last few years, some of the charges stuck, Paterno's old, he's lost control of the team, and there's a double standard when it comes to student athletes. Jesus, give me a job at ESPN, I could have done this piece months ago for you. But what was most surprising was ESPN got their hands on the confidential judicial affairs report of the incident at Meridian, a report I had heard about but didn't know anyone personally who had actually seen the document.

In it players are quoted as saying "we knew we were going there to beat people up," and "we had a reputation to uphold." But perhaps the most damning piece of information is what two players reportedly told judicial affairs about Paterno's involvement in the aftermath of the fight. In the report it states "all members of the team were sent a 'text message' by the head coach threatening to remove them from the team if they came into judicial affairs to speak." Although not mentioned in the ESPN piece, it also says later in the document that "Players also reported in these interviews that in the team meeting called to discuss the April 1 incident, they were told by "coach" not to talk to anyone about what happened."

So what's Paterno's reaction to this? "It's a lie ... I don't even know how to send a text message, I don't even have a computer. I don't send, I never sent a text message in my life." I think you have to believe JoePa on that one, my parents can't send a text message so I doubt there's any way Paterno's sending them, let alone one to everyone on the team.

But Gavin Keirans, UPUA president, makes a good point in his Student President Blog in the CDT titled "Did ESPN break Student Privacy Laws during Penn State football program?"
 

In it Keirans points out Judicial Affair's policy on record keeping which reads,"

• Judicial Affairs will only disclose student discipline record information to third parties in accordance with federal law (FERPA) and the University policy on managing Student Discipline Records (http://www.sa.psu.edu/ja).
• The Senior Director may also release information concerning the status of a discipline case to persons involved in the case and/or appropriate University officials with legitimate educational interests in such information.

Basically what it means is, there's no way we should have seen that document. But what I've been told is copies of the document were able to be obtained by students involved in the incident and given the fact that three students were interviewed by ESPN, the assumption has to be made that one of them gave the documents to the Worldwide Leader In Sports.

But perhaps the best part of this entire thing is the brief interview ESPN did with Stephen A. Smith during SportsCenter regarding the Penn State situation (I missed this actually because I went back to bed). As Black Shoes Diaries points out, saying that Smith, "from his years in Philadelphia, he's got a perspective on Penn State," is a big stretch especially since he apparently called the school "The University of Penn State." Nice one Stephen!