A silent stadium is proper response

Under the categories of either "twisted priorities" or "craniums firmly planted in the beachfront," (heads in the sand) an alarming number of social commentators summoned passionate prose for Joe Paterno last November, even as gruesome details of sexual abuse surfaced at Penn State.

Let me just say this: I would find it highly amusing to hear from you people again today, in the wake of former FBI director Louis Freeh's 267-page report, detailing Paterno's complicity in covering up Jerry Sandusky's child sex abuse for years.

"Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State," Freeh said. "The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized."

Fourteen years.

Think about that.

Turns out Paterno was worse than the fraud the initial findings indicated. He was a criminal. Unless you can think of a better word to describe someone in power whose neglect allowed a sexual predator to continue luring victims for more than a decade.

Just to keep it out of the papers.

I'd also like to hear from those returning Jeopardy champion students, who partook of the Million Moron March around campus, in support of good ol' PSU against all the heathens. I heard a dullard on Boston sports radio this week dismiss their actions as college kids using an excuse to get drunk.

Go say that to the parents of the victims, pal.

And keep your day job. Doubt those plans to one day lecture at Harvard will materialize.

This is right about the time any remaining apologists for Paterno and Penn State will site the need to "move forward." That's code for "we don't want to talk about this anymore." It would fit well with how Greater State College - now there's an oxymoron - has revealed itself backwoods and provincial enough to render the concepts of decency and humanity as less significant than the outcome of Saturday's game.

File that under "sad, but true."

It leaves us to rely on Penn State to do the right thing and cancel the football season. I'm not sure the NCAA has the authority to levy such a decision.

Which means there's no chance Penn State will do the right thing. We'll just base that on past performance.

A silent stadium for an extended number of fall Saturdays would be the best symbol yet of Joe Paterno's silence that allowed 14 years of sexual abuse to continue.

Surely, this is where more scholars will emerge from their caves to suggest that canceling the season would unjustly punish the current players, who have nothing to do with Jerry Sandusky's hobby. Then perhaps the NCAA could allow them to transfer immediately.

This is bigger than football.

I'd guess, too, that half the people clamoring to save the season would be feigning concern for the current players, caring far more about having their Saturday plans ruined or their Rose Bowl trip postponed.

Are we going to equate the outcome of a football season with children who were sexually assaulted?

If there's no season, maybe the players on the 2012 team can take the time to rethink whether they want to spend one more second on a campus whose most iconic figure turned out to be a criminal.

And whether they want to associate themselves with classmates who turned Penn State's benign neglect of a sexual deviant into a referendum about the job status of the football coach last November.

Let me also suggest that us "media jackals, professional muckrakers and holier-than-thou do-gooders," as one letter writer suggested last November, were only 100 percent correct. And that perhaps the next time you'd like to vomit a thesaurus, your outrage might be channeled toward years of cowardly silence.

I don't care about the logistics of canceling a season. This is the most disgraceful episode in the history of college sports. And we're going to celebrate the sport that was responsible for all this in front of 100,000 people every week come September?

Sickening.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.