Donnie Collins is a 1999 Penn State graduate who has covered minor league baseball and Penn State football for Times-Shamrock newspapers for nearly a decade.
They say that if, someday, humankind destroys itself with nuclear war, the cockroaches will be all that survive.
I've never believed that, honestly.
They're usually the first to go.
The bomb dropped at Penn State on Saturday. A haunting 23 pages worth of evidence released by the state attorney general's office that once-beloved Nittany Lions assistant Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulted eight young boys, and several high-ranking university officials not only knew what he was doing, but also covered it up for more than a decade rocked The Grand Experiment to its core. The cockroaches fell, one by one.
The 67-year-old Sandusky, if found guilty of the more than 30 counts against him, including seven of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and eight felony counts of unlawful contact with a minor, will die in prison.
And if they're found guilty of perjury and actually did know about the eyewitness accounts against Sandusky without reporting them to proper authorities as per the Child Protective Services Law, athletic director Tim Curley and university vice president Gary Schultz may spend a bit of time in the slammer, too - no easy assignment for two university administrators with clean records.
Society will lose nary a wink of sleep over any of it.
But when the nukes are falling, I doubt whether humankind will care much about the cockroaches. It will be everything else that stands to fall that will be at the forefront of minds. As the scandal rocking Penn State hit the national media Monday morning with a vigor never
before attracted by a university that has prided itself on avoiding the negative - never mind the utterly perverse - the focus didn't stay long on the likes of Sandusky, Curley and Schultz.
Invariably, it turned to one of the few people at Penn State who knew about the Sandusky allegations and did something somebody considered right in response.
But Joe Paterno will be spending the next several days, maybe even weeks, trying to convince his adoring public that he did enough.
He won't be able to, either.
Swarm is coming
At 12:30 this afternoon, Paterno will meet with the media for his weekly press conference, facing what might be the most difficult and challenging day of his 61-year coaching career.
A swarm of reporters representing both state and national media had already begun forming on campus Monday. Backup cornerback Mike Wallace tweeted that there were "paparazzi" awaiting the team outside the Lasch Football Building.
On the steps of Old Main on Sunday night, a group of students gathered to protest the university's inaction, holding signs criticizing university president Graham Spanier for declaring his "unconditional" support for Curley and Schultz.
"Tonight," one sign read, "I am ashamed of PSU."
Needless to say, it isn't going to be pretty for Paterno today, especially with his own grand jury testimony that he knew of the allegations against Sandusky and did little more than pass that knowledge on to Curley.
That's more than a bit ironic, in its own right.
For the nearly 20 years he served as Penn State's athletic director, those who have been around the program have seen Curley as little more than a rubber stamp for Paterno. Although the titles were reversed, JoePa essentially was the boss and Curley was his middle man.
Paterno testified he first heard about Sandusky's actions in 2002 after a graduate assistant, identified by several news outlets as current receivers coach and recruiting coordinator Mike McQueary, informed him that he caught Sandusky performing a sex act on a boy that looked to be about 10 inside the showers at the football facility.
McQueary told Paterno, his superior. Paterno told Curley, who by title at least was his superior. Then for almost a decade afterward, he did nothing. Sandusky struck again, repeatedly. The findings of fact indicate there were eight victims of Sandusky's alleged deviance. Two of them still aren't known, and on Monday, attorney general Linda Kelly urged them to come forward.
He's innocent until proven guilty, of course. But judging from the grand jury's report, the evidence piled against Sandusky is as overwhelming as it is sickening. Nobody should actually believe it's all-encompassing, either. Who knows how many victims may have gone unnoticed and remained silent. Who knows how much of this would have been prevented if somebody would have called the police instead of just reporting it to their boss.
Legend in fall
Quite frankly, the law didn't expect more of Paterno.
But we did.
And why shouldn't we? I thought about what I was going to write in this column for a few days, honestly. I thought as hard as I've ever thought for a column on what course of action should be taken with Paterno. Should I advocate his firing? Should he resign and take the focus of the Sandusky scandal away from an innocent football team that is 8-1 and starting its toughest stretch of the season this week? Should he be left alone, absolved by both the law and the people? Still, I'm finding it difficult to settle on any one position.
It depends on so many factors: What exactly did McQueary tell Paterno about what he saw during that fateful time back in 2002? Did Paterno report exactly what he heard to Curley and Schultz? Did Paterno feel that by telling Schultz, who was in charge of the Campus Police Department at the time, he was indeed reporting the incident to police? Did Paterno ever follow up with anybody - Curley, Schultz, police, even Sandusky - in the weeks or months or years after the incident? In Paterno's defense, he's the one person with any power at Penn State who has shown any type of emotion over this.
In a statement released Sunday, Paterno called the charges "shocking," and he said he was "saddened." He asked for patience from Penn Staters, but he also indicated there's a possibility he and others were "fooled" by what they considered to be a good man with the highest moral values.
At best, Paterno is a guy who heard a vile story about a friend and colleague, had the courage to report it to someone who could do something about it, and hoped for years that the fact nothing came of it meant it wasn't true.
At worst, Paterno is no better than Curley or Schultz. He knew, and he did nothing. He didn't call the police. He didn't get Sandusky help.
He didn't warn the parents or children at Sandusky's Second Mile charity, which unwittingly served his victims to him on a silver platter.
Reality is that Paterno is probably somewhere in the middle, firmly in the gray area on an issue that is purely black and white. He isn't huddling with the cockroaches just yet, but he isn't necessarily guaranteed to survive all of this, either. His tenure on Penn State's sideline, no matter what, seems to be more than just approaching its closing moments.
While my guess is that when he meets the most determined press corps he ever faces today, Paterno will say early on that he's either not going to answer any questions about an ongoing investigation, or that he's not allowed to answer them.
But if I were him, I would.
It's about time someone at Penn State answered the tough questions, said what he knows and didn't hide behind legalese. Spanier didn't.
Paterno has to.
It's a chance to do not merely what is required, but what is right.
Fact of the matter is, this is what so many in charge at Penn State should have done a decade ago, when the first hints that Jerry Sandusky was more monster than legend began to surface.
Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com