http://cache.deadspin.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/deadspin.com.png http://deadspin.com/tag/penn state nittany lions http://deadspin.com/tag/penn state nittany lions

Ol' Jerry gave his own Checkers speech earlier today in front of the Centre County (Pa.) Courthouse. "Now I can't take our dog on my deck and throw out biscuits to him," he said. That's because people were apparently filming him taking his dog on his deck and throwing biscuits out to it. You can watch the video below, but be warned: Sandusky apparently now prefers Cleveland Browns gear to his usual Penn State attire. [via] More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5884167&view=rss&microfeed=true

Try to follow along: Tim Curley, the on-leave Penn State athletic director, told the grand jury investigating Jerry Sandusky that Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's counsel at the time, was present as his lawyer when he testified in January of last year. But Lanny Davis, the attorney Penn State hired in December to guide it through this mess, now says Baldwin was there that day on behalf of Penn State, and that she wasn't representing Curley or Gary Schultz, the two PSU administrators charged with perjury and failure to report abuse in connection with Sandusky's alleged crimes. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5882171&view=rss&microfeed=true

Gov. Tom Corbett declared yesterday that all flags on state facilities be at half-staff until Joe Paterno is buried. It's a decision that's generating plenty of opinions pro and con, given Paterno's complex legacy in relation to his towering stature in Pennsylvania. But it's curious that Corbett saw fit to honor Paterno in this way. Corbett, after all, was among those who decided two months ago to fire Joe Paterno. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878935&view=rss&microfeed=true

During the grand jury's investigation of Jerry Sandusky, it was Joe Paterno who provided the testimony that corraborated Mike McQueary's story, which is what led to the perjury and failure to report abuse charges against Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878782&view=rss&microfeed=true

Uh huh. That's exactly what happened to him. Yep. [SI Vault] More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878464&view=rss&microfeed=true

The Associated Press is reporting that Joe Paterno has in fact died, according to a statement released by his family this morning. The full text, as provided by the AP, is provided below. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878218&view=rss&microfeed=true

Twitter has been abuzz in the last few hours with plenty of rumors about Joe Paterno's deteriorating condition, but Michael Sisak of the Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) Citizens' Voice, citing a source, says Paterno is "near death": More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878170&view=rss&microfeed=true

Never mind the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky's child sex abuse: Joe Paterno is the biggest victim of all. At least that seems to be the opinion of those deluded Penn Staters who continue to make Paterno their primary concern. And arguably no one has tilted more stupidly at that stupid windmill than Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris. Just after Paterno was axed, Harris rushed to his defense and even gave up his job. He then drove for three-plus hours that same day to give somebody a piece of his mind, only to do little more than eat a sticky bun. And today, after a meeting at which Penn State's Board of Trustees announced a change in leadership, Harris held a press conference of his own. And he demanded that Paterno get his job back for as many games as he was forced to miss at the end of the 2011 season. Which is totally gonna happen. [via] More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5878021&view=rss&microfeed=true

That's according to what two members of the university's Faculty Council who had met with Freeh last week told ESPN. Freeh, the former director of the FBI, had promised "complete independence" when he was hired by the school in the weeks after the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke. This is from ESPN: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5877714&view=rss&microfeed=true

Thirteen of the 32 members of Penn State's Board of Trustees sat down with The New York Times yesterday to finally tell their side of the story. The resulting published narrative walks us through how the board reacted in the immediate aftermath of the release of the Jerry Sandusky grand jury presentment, culminating with their decision to fire Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno on Nov. 9. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5877579&view=rss&microfeed=true

The last place any sane person wanted to be this past Friday night was the Marriott hotel in Manhattan's financial district. The hotel's grand ballroom would be a good setting for a bad prom, complete with an ugly red carpet and garish inverted-pyramid chandeliers. An uneasy crowd of about 300 Penn State alums had gathered inside. They'd come to put questions to PSU president Rodney Erickson during the final stage of Erickson's three-act Sandusky-apologia roadshow. A town hall, it was called. (The first two towns had been Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.) I'd come to witness the stagecraft involved. The press, me included, was stationed at the back of the room and admonished to "respect their observer status." That meant no questions from us. Which was fine. Erickson wouldn't have answered anyway. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5876649&view=rss&microfeed=true

Not long ago, we told you about the stupidly triumphant internal Sandusky memos that got passed around at meetings of the Penn State board of trustees mere days after the scandal broke. The memos, first obtained by the AP (and now by us), showed the low-IQ spinjobbing you've come to expect from some unaware inhabitants of the Happy Valley snow globe. There was celebratory talk about "taking control of the narrative" and how "No Penn State terms appear on Google's Top 20 search terms for second day in a row." A little premature, no? More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5876025&view=rss&microfeed=true

Sure, part of the reason Sally Jenkins was able to land the interview in the first place was because the article was guaranteed to be a five page waste of time. But still, the much-hyped article does not even tackle the McQueary meeting until page four. Yes, we get an inside look at what life is now like for Joe Paterno. He is sick. He is in a wheelchair. He is surrounded by his family. There's even a video where Jenkins herself explains how she gave Paterno every opportunity to bash Penn State, to no avail. Just what we've all been wondering about! More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5876169&view=rss&microfeed=true

Good ol' Scotty. Kind of the black sheep of the Paterno family. Once referred to as a "morbidly porcine man-child." Also a bit of a wingnut, it seems. I called up JoePa's son today to ask him—not his dad—about some information I'd gotten from a source close to the Paternos. I left Scott a polite message. A few minutes later, he called back. He was angry, gibbering, roaring. He machine-gunned words at me: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5876045&view=rss&microfeed=true

Rodney Erickson, the new president of Penn State, is taking questions from concerned alumni this week at a series of townhall-style meetings. Though he's promised a new era of openness and transparency, Erickson displayed plenty of evasiveness and contradiction even before he set out for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, with a final stop in New York City slated for tonight. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5875890&view=rss&microfeed=true

The first line of the editor's letter from Tina Hay in the new issue of The Penn Stater makes it clear: "This is not the January/February issue we had planned." And so it is not. The magazine staff had intended to run a cover story on "great concert memories at Penn State." Then the Sandusky story broke, the terra heaved, and great concert memories no longer seemed so great, at least not for the subsequent issue of The Penn Stater. No, that magazine could only have been about the Sandusky scandal. A "crisis," Hay called it. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5875861&view=rss&microfeed=true

That's according to what former Nittany Lions linebacker Brandon Short said during an appearance Wednesday afternoon on ESPN's Outside the Lines (audio above). Citing what he called "two independent sources," Short said Jerry Sandusky watched Penn State defeat Illinois from the box that belonged to Graham Spanier, who has since resigned as Penn State's president in the wake of the Sandusky scandal. And later Wednesday, the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, citing sources of its own, confirmed what Short said. To which the Patriot-News added: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5875408&view=rss&microfeed=true

Rodney Erickson was named the interim president of Penn State on Nov. 9, the night Graham Spanier resigned in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. The school lifted the interim tag from Erickson the following week, formally putting him in charge, and soon after he stated his commitment to "transparency to the fullest extent possible." More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5874170&view=rss&microfeed=true

In Greek mythology, many apparent protagonists are later forced to face the wrath of the gods for showing excessive pride, arrogance or just losing touch with reality in general. Welcome back to State College, where hubris isn't so much a trait as it is a way of life. On top of being unfortunately titled, Jerry Sandusky's autobiography, Touched, apparently helped investigators track down several of the victims who would eventually play a vital role in bringing child molestation charges against the former Penn State coach. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5874052&view=rss&microfeed=true

After unleashing a series of venomous tweets last evening in which he declared himself to be "done" with the "corrupt, disgusting" entity that is Penn State University, former Nittany Lion linebacker LaVar Arrington attempted to backtrack today during his radio program on DC's 106.7 "The Fan." More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5873798&view=rss&microfeed=true

Yahoo's Pat Forde, late of ESPN, had an interesting aside in his column today, a piece otherwise devoted to blasting Penn State for hiring Bill O'Brien, the chin-holed rookie Patriots offensive coordinator, as its new head coach: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5873774&view=rss&microfeed=true

New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien agreed last night to take the head coaching job at Penn State. O'Brien, like Joe Paterno, graduated from Brown and has since coached at Georgia Tech, Maryland, and Duke. He's never before had a head coaching job and ran the Patriots' offense for only one year. Maybe no one really wanted the Penn State job—given the alleged child rape and coverup there—but even then O'Brien seems a weird choice. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5873734&view=rss&microfeed=true

The AP got its claws on four internal memos circulated among Penn State's board of trustees and the school's new president Rodney Erickson mere days after charges were filed against accused child rapist Jerry Sandusky last November. More face. More egg. The memos are about damage control, money, and little else. What'd you expect at this point? More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5873489&view=rss&microfeed=true

We got an email, telegram-style, this morning: "Pedobear spotted tailgating outside ticket city bowl in Dallas complete with joepa cleats." We figured it was just a gag tailgate outfit that would never make it into the TicketCity Bowl (at the Cotton Bowl) and that we might not wind up with photographic evidence. Boy, were we wrong. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5872516&view=rss&microfeed=true

In what's easily the most fucking reprehensible news to come out of the Jerry Sandusky affair outside of the actual offenses Sandusky's alleged to have committed, gay video online store TLAGay.com is promoting a "What Would Sandusky Watch?" series, featuring films with titles like Cold Showers and Punish Me. Here's one synopsis: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5870987&view=rss&microfeed=true

Sandusky. Paterno. The whistle that no one blew. The sweatpants riots and the sad, sad bros and the news van tipped over like some sort of Holstein cow. Penn State was horror and farce, all at once—the whole range of human folly on display. 1-800-REALITY, indeed. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5870642&view=rss&microfeed=true

Jerry Sandusky has six adopted children. One of them is Matt. He's a Second Mile kid who burned down a barn as a teenager and attempted suicide as a foster child in the Sandusky home in 1995. Plenty has been reported about Matt's unstable behavior, which includes several stalking and harassment incidents. Matt first found himself in criminal court in 2001, after harassing a former lover of his soon-to-be wife. According to documents located by the Deadspin field unit in a central Pennsylvania courthouse (and posted below), Matt, now 33, would call his rival, say mean things, and hang up. His preferred mean thing to say was, in hindsight, also infelicitous: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5869815&view=rss&microfeed=true

As far as Ronald Schreffler is concerned, he did his job. Schreffler has worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security since 2006, but he spent 33 years with Penn State's university police. Thirteen years ago, he was working as a detective for the campus cops when a woman came forward with a complaint that Jerry Sandusky had showered with her son, a boy now known to the world as Victim 6, thanks to the original grand jury presentment. That complaint resulted in a nearly 100-page police report and allegedly an admission from Sandusky to the woman that he had acted inappropriately—an admission that was made with Schreffler and a detective from the State College police listening in, unknown to Sandusky. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5869502&view=rss&microfeed=true

We posted a story last week about Deadspin's failure to infiltrate the Penn State football showers where Jerry Sandusky used to shower with boys. A reader later sent us this photo of what his friend says are showers in the Lasch Football Building. Exciting, no? The friend is a manager for the Nebraska football team, which played Penn State in State College a few days after Sandusky was arrested in November. While there, the manager snapped this shot of what, presumably, are the showers in the visiting locker room. Here's the full picture: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5869442&view=rss&microfeed=true

While starter Matt McGloin remains questionable for the Ticket City Bowl after being knocked out by a teammate in practice, some light has been shed on backup Rob Bolden's legal troubles. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5869431&view=rss&microfeed=true

According to various Penn State reporters' twitter feeds, handily pieced together by Larry Brown Sports, the Penn State locker room played host to some more horsing around today as wide receiver Curtis Drake knocked out Matt McGloin following some "jawing in practice." More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5869071&view=rss&microfeed=true

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.—Once the promised spectacle of Jerry Sandusky's scheduled hearing had fallen apart on Tuesday, what was there to do around State College, Pa., but try to get a look at the Nittany Lions' shower room? Dom and I wanted to photograph the scene of the most appallingly detailed of the alleged crimes, in the Lasch Football Building. The plumbing. The lockers. The layout—the building reportedly has "huge wood-paneled locker room that rivals any in the NFL." More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868785&view=rss&microfeed=true

Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary testified this morning that he had not used the specific words "sodomy," "rape," or "anal sex" when he first told Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and then-vice president Gary Schultz what he had seen Jerry Sandusky doing to a boy in the football showers on March 1, 2002. But at today's preliminary hearing on the charges against Curley and Schultz, according to an account of McQueary's testimony written by Sara Ganim of the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, McQueary made it clear he had told those officials that what he saw was "severe": More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868802&view=rss&microfeed=true

One of the big questions in the Jerry Sandusky case is what the cops knew and when. The "cops" would be the Penn State University police. Those are the cops who investigated Sandusky in 1998 for alleged sexual misconduct. Nothing happened with that case because the district attorney at the time declined to file charges. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868787&view=rss&microfeed=true

Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary was the first witness called this morning at the preliminary hearing for Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, which is taking place right now in Harrisburg, Pa. Curley, Penn State's on-leave athletic director, and Schultz, the school's former senior vice president for business and finance, are both charged with perjury and failure to report abuse. McQueary, the prosecution's star witness, has already testified that he witnessed "Jerry molesting a boy" and that he told Joe Paterno the next day he had seen Sandusky doing something that was "way over the lines" and "extremely sexual in nature." More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868738&view=rss&microfeed=true

Are you bored? Would you like to have some fun with a public records request? I thought you might. To play this game, the first thing you need to know is that the public records law in Pennsylvania is flawed. It allows schools like Penn State that hoover up tax dollars to avoid public scrutiny. That's bad for a lot of reasons made obvious by the Jerry Sandusky scandal. The second thing to know about the public records law in Pennsylvania is that the people who process the requests usually don't want to process them. And sometimes they stonewall you for no good reason other than that they suck bird. I offer you the example of the Clinton County DA's office in Lock Haven, Pa. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868559&view=rss&microfeed=true

You've heard (an awful, awful lot) from Joe Amendola, the lead attorney for Jerry Sandusky's defense. Now you will hear from his co-counsel, Karl Rominger, who appeared on CNN to explain away Sandusky's disturbing Bob Costas interview last month with the following description of his client: More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868429&view=rss&microfeed=true

A new attorney, Karl Rominger, recently joined up with Jerry Sandusky's defense team, and he's starting to make Lawyerin' Joe Amendola, Sandusky's blundering counsel, look like Larry Tribe. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868312&view=rss&microfeed=true

We've already told you about Jerry Sandusky's attempt last year to become a volunteer assistant coach at D-III Juniata College in central Pennsylvania. His effort was thwarted when a background check revealed the inconvenient detail that he was under investigation for something. And even though the check did not specify that a grand jury was looking into allegations that Sandusky had committed acts of sex abuse against children, Juniata officials were credited for having done their due diligence by denying Sandusky's application. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5867740&view=rss&microfeed=true

BELLEFONTE, Pa.—Jack-all of substance happened in the Centre County courthouse today, as you already know. Jerry Sandusky waived his preliminary hearing. No witnesses testified; no new information came out. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5867756&view=rss&microfeed=true