Sunday Column: Leave the past in the past when it comes to Beaver Stadium and Joe Paterno

We all want to hold on to at least a bit of the past, if only because we tend to remember the good times a touch more fondly than maybe they actually deserved. James Franklin took on a somewhat wistful tone this week when, speaking in the context of the transfer portal and NIL, he said, “The reality is the college football that we’ve all known, the college athletics that we’ve all known, that’s not coming back.”

And then there is Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano, who decided this week, with a few others, to bring a controversial chunk of the football program’s past back into the present and future by presenting a resolution to name the Beaver Stadium playing surface for longtime head coach Joe Paterno to the rest of the university’s trustees.

Let me get two important disclaimers out of the way here. First, I have no desire to weigh in on whether Paterno deserves such a posthumous honor, on how his legacy or his family have been treated by the university (now on its third president and third athletic director since he died in 2012), and certainly not on how much culpability he should be assigned for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes or how Penn State handled them. The second is that I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that the stadium turf will bear his name in the near future, barring a nine-figure donation being attached to it, of course.

But I get why there is a push to do it, and why a not-insignificant portion of Nittany Nation (and a small but vocal part of the board) is so adamant that Paterno is honored, if not in that specific way, or with a Joe and Sue Paterno Day (another part of Lubrano’s resolution, which was withdrawn after comments from Jay Paterno), then with similarly grand gestures.

Because with every day that passes, Paterno’s memory fades a little more.

It’s been 12 years since Paterno left this earth. To some, it feels like just yesterday. To others, especially the younger part of the fan base, that name means very little. That isn’t an indictment of Paterno or taking sides — that’s just the way life, and history, works. Whether your name is on a building or your, ahem, statue sits outside of it, your true legacy resides in the people who knew you and who were directly impacted or influenced by you. No matter how famous you might have been or what might have been written about you, no matter how many people once revered you, those people grow old and die, too. The entirety of the people who make up Penn State, from players to coaches to administrators to students to alumni to fans, is a mix of people who remember Joe and those who don’t, and only one of those groups is going to grow in the years ahead.

If you’ve been paying attention, the university has been taking subtle steps to bring Paterno back into the fold. A short clip in a video here. His name on the building’s new wall of honor there. And yes, the family name is still on the university library, which is arguably something the Brown graduate would have been most proud of.

Maybe there are other gestures ahead that could acknowledge the vast contributions he made to the program and to Penn State, somehow without dragging the scandal directly back into it. What those might be and when they might come are decisions I wouldn’t want to make and don’t envy those who would. But at this particular moment in time, when the university is facing a $94 million budget cut (to say nothing of the $800 million renovation price tag on the stadium we’re talking about re-naming), you would sure as hell hope the board of trustees would have far more pressing concerns.

Because here’s the thing: Naming the stadium field after Paterno, for more than a few people, would cross a line, send the wrong message. And for others, it wouldn’t be enough. In the long run, as the last of the people who played for him and had their lives changed because of him are laid to rest, the name painted on the Beaver Stadium grass won’t mean much if any more to those who play on it than the name of James Beaver does to the people who flock to the stadium on Saturdays this fall.

Time may or may not heal all wounds. But it always marches on.