APBefore any of you start complaining that this site isn?t College Football Talk or Penn State Football Talk or any other creative (or otherwise) alternative name, let me remind you that the scroll function allows you to skip past this story, if you aren?t interested.
Jason Whitlock?s latest column on the Jerry Sandusky scandal perfectly, accurately, and thoroughly captures the dynamic that compelled former Penn State graduate assistant (and undoubtedly soon-to-be-former receivers coach) Mike McQueary to neither call the police nor physically intervene after allegedly seeing Sandusky engaging in the rape of a young boy in the Nittany Lion locker room.
I endorse Whitlock?s take in large part because it meshes with the initial point I made, far less artfully than Whitlock, when discussing the situation on PFT Live last week.
?When you become aware of some troubling situation in an organization, the knee-jerk reaction is to protect,? I said on November 9.? ?Protect yourself, protect your friend, protect your colleague, protect the name of the institution.? Whatever it is, whether it?s Penn State or whether it?s a mom-and-pop delicatessen.? There?s an instinct, it?s human nature, to want to protect.? And it?s easy to justify that, even in a situation as horrendous as this one, it?s very easy for a guy like Joe Paterno to tell himself, ?This is going to hurt the university.? This is going to hurt the students.? This is going to hurt the faculty.? This is going to hurt a lot of innocent people.?? Never mind the innocent kids who had unspeakable actions committed against them.? People rationalize by protecting their own interests ? their own selfish interests and by extension the interests of those around them.?
I firmly believe that, if Joe Paterno had called the police in 2002, he would have been fired by 2003, once the authorities realized the extent of the conduct about which Paterno knew or should have known.? And that?s why Paterno merely kicked the information up to his ?superiors,? who in reality were his subordinates.
Whitlock now focuses on McQueary, who properly alerted Paterno to the incident but did nothing (contrary to McQueary?s more recent claims) to alert the authorities.? Meanwhile, McQueary continued to show up for work in that same locker room where he witnessed behavior that supposedly left him distraught, while his career progressed from graduate assistant to (as of 2003) administrative assistant to (as of 2004) receivers coach and recruiting coordinator.
Whitlock?s theory is that anyone who claims he would have beaten the crap out of Sandusky and then dragged him by the feet to the nearest police station ignores our human nature.? (It also overlooks the potential impact of shock, which could trigger an instinct to simply flee.)? If we witness a stranger commit a crime, we immediately call the cops.? If we become aware of criminal conduct within our own cocoon, we first consider the consequences of blowing the whistle.
How will this affect my colleagues?? How will this affect my organization?
How will this affect me?? How will this affect my family?
?In America, our instinct is to survive financially,? Whitlock writes.? ?We hate Mike McQueary because of what he and his decisions say about us.?
In this case, and at the risk of being far more cynical than 18 years of practicing law and 11 years of covering the NFL have made me, it?s hard not to wonder whether McQueary?s survival instinct caused him not simply to protect himself, but also to leverage the circumstances into an assignment much more prestigious, secure, and lucrative than graduate assistant.
After what he had witnessed, why else would he have stayed at Penn State?
Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/11/17/johnny-jolly-gets-six-years-in-prison/related/
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