Some factors that permitted the scandal to go unpunished for to many years because the coaching staff and many of the players were seen as members of the community and by the team as those who could do no wrong. At the beginning of the film, one of the people interviewed says that in State College Pennsylvania, Joe Paterno was God and Jerry Sandusky was Jesus and that the two could do no wrong. Many of the players say Joe Paterno as the father they never had. Paterno also empathized graduating and getting an education to being just as important as playing football. The team had a reputation of being a team where 85% of their players graduated but were still a team that went to bowl games. The team itself had a great reputation. Sandusky himself was also running a charity called second mile, which helped underprivileged children. At one point in the film an interviewer says how you expect a child molester to be someone creepy and scary, but the worst child molesters are the ones with the most access to children. The community just saw Sandusky as a football coach who was looking to help out those less fortunate, which ended up to be the perfect cover as a child molester.
The term…show more content… The film shows students rioting after Joe Paterno was fired. There are so scenes where fans are continuing to take pictures with the Paterno satue even after the public finds out he knew about the allegations years ago. Despite the negative backlash from the media and these findings were coming to be public knowledge, the fans still stuck by the team. Some of the fans even believed Paterno did nothing wrong. Many of the fans in the film were so influenced by the culture Penn State football had created they could not see that what the university had done was wrong. The team, as well as Paterno played such a large role in their lives, they were going to stick by him no matter
