Who decided to remove the Paterno Statue?

In an earlier post I speculated that the Penn State Board of Trustees helped write the consent decree and the sanctions that came along with it. Ray Blehar has gone into much more detail at www.notpsu.blogspot.com as well. With the two recent releases of emails (here and here) in the Corman v. NCAA suit I wanted to revisit this idea and add to it.

Revisiting my old post I still think there is no doubt that the Board wanted the sanctions and the SITF made sure the Freeh report said this was all a football problem, but I found some interesting items that seem to point towards the NCAA piling on, which may have caught the power bloc of the board by surprise.


The interesting events occurred in the days leading up to the removal of the Paterno statue and the announcement of the consent decree. Don Van Natta reported on July 15th that the Board decided to keep the statue.

Two days later Donald Remy emails Omar McNeil of the Freeh Group to tell him that NCAA President Mark Emmert has requested a meeting with Louis Freeh:

This was the same day that Emmert had scheduled a conference call with the Division I board of directors about the situation at Penn State:

Just two days later Chairman Peetz requested a conference call for all voting members of the board where she attached an article that would foreshadow how the power bloc wanted to play the scandal and its position moving forward:

Shortly after the request for a conference call the NCAA sprung a surprise on the Board, the vacation of all wins.

It was only at this point that the representative for Penn State, Gene Marsh, began to protest, saying he felt that the NCAA was trying to reform college athletics through one case. 

What can we "reasonably conclude" from these exchanges? I think there are two things that were likely to have happened. First, it seems the Board really did want to salvage some of Paterno's legacy and was prepared to leave the statue where it was. They knew that removal of the statue would incense many alumni and they have been trying the whole time in this scandal to play both sides. However it appears that the NCAA and Emmert may have demanded the removal of the statue AND of course obviously demanded the removal of the past wins of Joe Paterno. They conveniently 'forgot' to mention it until it appears most of the consent decree was negotiated. Marsh correctly knew this would be a point of contention because he likely knew that while the Board wanted blame on Paterno, they didn't want too much, as it would keep attention on their failures from angry alumni. 

From the outset of the Sandusky scandal Corbett, the OAG, the Board, the B1G, and the NCAA have made one supreme miscalculation that is a basic principle of conflict. Never underestimate your enemy. They underestimated what Joe Paterno meant to our great school, and how far many of us will go to fight for his good name. It appears likely that the Board underestimated the NCAA's vindictiveness and self-promotional nature when trying to play both sides in the negotiation of sanctions. They will pay dearly for that.