OPINION

When crossing lines gets easy

For the record, Penn State got off easy.

No one who looked the other way while Jerry Sandusky preyed on children deserves to escape shame and should forever face questions about how they conducted themselves. You don't get to stand silently by when monsters do their business without being held to account.

And yet the presumption of innocence is both a foundation of our legal system and our sense of decency. We do not credit hearsay evidence; we need facts to corroborate suspicion. A certain amount of process is due even outside the courtroom. Because people lie and confabulate and think they know more than they do--because gossip has a certain malignant power--honorable people ought to withhold judgment until they acquaint themselves with what's known about a given allegation.

But that's not how the world operates, and some of us are willing to employ any means necessary to get what we want. Every day the reputations of good people are trashed because someone seeks a political or financial advantage, and some people believe this is just part of the game. In Donald Segretti's time they called it "dirty tricks," and employed a compound verb I can't use in this newspaper because we quaintly hold onto old-fashioned notions of decorum.

"All's fair," they say.

But all isn't fair. There are lines, and even if some powerful people don't recognize those lines, they exist as surely as right and wrong exist.

Perhaps I should say if right and wrong exist. For if you're a moral relativist, which I sometimes fear most of us are, you can gerrymander those lines however you'd like. That's why you have people who have no problem damning Al Franken while excusing Roy Moore and Donald Trump or pretending Bill Clinton's peccadilloes weren't deeply troubling. If all you care about is scoring points for your team, if you value facts only to the extent that they tend to license your desire, then you can just say anything you please about anyone you want.

You can accuse Joe Scarborough of murder.

You can accuse Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano of covering up pedophilia.

That's what a lot of University of Tennessee football fans did when they found out the university was about to make him their new head football coach; they took a few lines of testimony from a 2015 deposition by former Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary--the graduate assistant who said he walked in on Sandusky and a boy in the shower in an otherwise empty locker room one night in 2001 and reported the incident to head coach Joe Paterno the next morning--in which he indicated that Tom Bradley, another assistant coach, had told him he had heard Schiano had witnessed a similar incident with Sandusky and a boy in the early '90s, when Schiano was an assistant coach at Penn State.

McQueary, you'll remember, was the state's star witness in criminal trials against Sandusky as well as Penn State's president, vice president and athletic director. After he was fired, he won a $7 million whistle-blower lawsuit against the school. When the transcript of his deposition surfaced in 2016, after the court documents were unsealed, Schiano was asked about the alleged incident.

"I never saw any abuse, nor had reason to suspect any abuse, during my time at Penn State," he said at the time. He stands by that.

And Bradley denies ever telling the story. He says he didn't know anything about abuse at Penn State.

Now, let's take a moment. I don't think McQueary fabricated the story about Schiano and Sandusky, but he's talking about an incident which occurred 25 years previously that he says was related to him by someone who now denies he ever heard such a story. It's simply not credible. Sure, it could be true, but it could be that McQueary is mis-remembering. Maybe he heard it from someone other than Bradley. Or maybe Bradley told him the story and now regrets gossiping about Schiano.

I don't know. You don't know. Schiano knows. And the rest of us are going to have to take his word because there's no reason to doubt it.

Still, Tennessee fans latched onto the allegations against Schiano, not because they believed he might actually be guilty, but because they don't want him running the college football team. Claims that he looked the other way while Sandusky was abusing children were used as a pretext to pressure the university from withdrawing the job offer. And this was OK because Vols fans thought they deserved a bigger name with a bigger reputation or a deeper connection to what they consider their vaunted tradition.

Wow.

I'll allow there are legitimate arguments against hiring Schiano. His mediocre head coaching record, for one. He coached Rutgers for 11 years and won one more game than he lost there. While you could point out that he was building a program during that time and couldn't really be expected to win big, that program has essentially cratered since Rutgers moved to the Big 10. Nor did he cover himself in glory as head coach of the professional Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (Word is he tried to bully full-grown professionals the same way college coaches get away with bullying young men and lost the locker room.)

If increasing one's chances of winning is the chief criterion for hiring a new head coach at a public university--and I'll go along with that premise for the sake of argument while privately holding onto the belief that other qualities, including one's character, ought to be more important--then Schiano might not have been the best choice to lead the Volunteers forward. Schiano might have a lot of merits as a football coach, but you can see why fans who wanted a winner might have been unhappy with the hire.

But on the other hand, maybe Schiano was about the best they could do under the circumstances. After all, since UT fired head coach Phil Fulmer at the end of the 2008 season they've won exactly one more game than they've lost. And now--after the fiasco that saw Schiano hired and then abruptly dropped--it's kind of difficult to imagine them attracting any proven head coach.

It's hard to imagine them attracting anyone who values decency over a larger paycheck.

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Editorial on 12/03/2017

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