Thank You Joe Pa

It may seem “old school,” but it sure is a breath of fresh air. In an era when sports players seem to get away with anything with a slap on the wrist, Joe Paterno is laying down some discipline at Penn State.

From Dan Wentzel at Yahoo! Sports:

This spring, six Penn State football players were arrested and charged for crimes stemming from an off-campus fight in which at least 15 Nittany Lions were present. The charged included a couple of star players, although what apparently bothered coach Joe Paterno the most was how many of his kids were willing to be involved.

And so Paterno, 80 now but no less tough, no less disciplined, hatched a plan to set
things right within his program. He’ll let the local legal and student judicial process play out, but regardless he decided that to keep people from thinking his team was trash, it’ll spend the fall cleaning it up.

According to Paterno, the Penn State football team will clean Beaver Stadium after each home football game this fall. It’ll gather garbage, sweep stairs and maybe even hose parts down.

It’ll be Notre Dame on Saturday, nacho spills on Sunday.

It’s a job that usually goes to members of club sports on campus – say, rugby or crew – which do it to raise money so they can compete. Paterno said the clubs still will get the $5,000 for the job, but his guys, fresh off playing 60 minutes of major college football the day before, will do all the work starting Sunday morning.

“We’re all going to do it, everybody,” Paterno told the Harrisburg Patriot-News after a banquet in suburban Philadelphia. “Not just the kids that were involved. ‘Cause we’re all in it together. This is a team embarrassment. I wouldn’t call it anything much other than that.”

This is easily the greatest punishment in recent collegiate history, an absolutely diabolical, telling, high-impact bit of discipline that should remind one and all that what Paterno has been doing out in State College, Pa., all these years is more than just win 363 football games, including 20 the past two seasons.

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 [caring what others think].

Except about what’s right.

Don’t you just love the idea of the football players cleaning up nacho cheese, then giving the money to the crew team?

Discipline. It’s an idea that just might work!