“It’s better to worship heroes that are dead. It’ll be very unlikely that they will disappoint you.”

a commenter responding to Doug Glanville’s piece about the fallibility of sports legends like Joe Paterno

The Lesson of Joe Paterno

Jim Prisching / AP

Sports legends make us forget about human frailty until, inevitably, they remind us again

“You can think of Joe Paterno as morally repugnant, but there are a lot of men out there that have college degrees because of him. On the other hand, it also appears that there are young men out there whose lives could have been much better if more or better actions had been taken to stop Sandusky.”

Commenter rem54 responding to Kayla Webley’s piece about Penn State taking the No. 1 spot for academic performance among the top 25 ranked Bowl Championship Series teams

Paterno’s Payback? Penn State Football is No. 1 in Academic Bowl

Scott Stuart / Southcreek / Zuma

New rankings of the graduation rates of top football programs reaffirm Penn State’s reputation for creating athlete-scholars

Jon Meacham

Can We Prevent Another Penn State?

Gene J. Puskar / AP

We may not be able to legislate responsibility, but we certainly can try

Judith Warner

How Low Can We Go?

The angry, and baffling, refusals to take Herman Cain and Joe Paterno to task make fools of us all

Ruth Davis Konigsberg

Scampering Around the Word Rape

Why are we so afraid to call this crime what it actually is?

Doug Glanville

Silence in the Locker Room

Getty Images

College sports is where you learn to protect every member of your team, even when you know very little about them