college football

Mike McQueary and Jim Calhoun. Those are the only names you need to know about the Penn State sexual abuse and cover up scandal that has moved from ESPN to mainstream news sources this week with a pace much faster and with more urgency than anyone at the actual institution showed when it came to the safety of young boys. While more is going to come out of this story and I suspect at one point someone might actually go to jail, I still say the entire scandal goes back to two names, Mike McQueary and Jim Calhoun.

Why? Because they are the two men who actually directly saw Jerry Sandusky sexually abuse young boys in his charge. In so many other cases of sexual abuse that go public, from the Catholic church scandals to various local public school sex abuse cases that pop up every year the final prosecutions and convictions have to come down to children’s words and parents reports versus that of a trusted adult who is doing his damndest to lie and stay out of jail.  However, that’s not what happened here. In this case you had eyewitnesses.

You had two men (one of whom, Calhoun can’t testify now because he suffers from dementia, but he saw the assault in 2000) directly see these crimes being committed and no one in authority did anything about it. This was an open and shut case, you have two eye witnesses reporting the same crime at different points over a 2 year period and no one was fired, no one was put in jail and no heads rolled. There’s just no getting around what a despicable moral failing this was on coach Joe Paterno and anyone else who even caught wind of these two stories. This is a bigger black eye to college football, and it’s penchant for corrupt, money grubbing double standards and backroom cover-ups  than any cheating scandal by a bunch of knuckleheads.

This article originally appeared at Politic365.com.