![]() As a result, Paterno no longer holds either of these lifetime coaching records officially, he now ranks twelfth in Division I. _In late July 2012, the NCAA announced that its punishment of Penn State for the Sandusky scandal would include the vacating of all wins by the football program dating back to 1998. Nobody knew it then, but that was the last game Joe Paterno would coach.ġ. The reporters’ questions sounded tired too. 1 President Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley showed up to give him a plaque. It wasn’t an official record, but it gave Penn State the opportunity to celebrate Paterno one more time. But he had passed Grambling’s Eddie Robinson for the top spot on the Division I list for victories. He already had the record for Division I-A so this wasn’t exactly a record. When Penn State beat Illinois on October 29, it was Paterno’s 409th victory as a coach. ![]() He was 84 years old, but he announced to anyone who would listen that he had not felt this good in years. "You need a ride, Joe?" they would shout through the car window, and he would wave his hand, smile, and keep walking, as he had as a young man, focusing on the road ahead. During the previous two seasons he had been ill and looked gaunt now he had the strength to walk again, and he walked all over State College. Joe Paterno began the last football preseason of his life feeling great. As a result, GQ has inserted footnotes at various points to contextualize facts that had not yet come to light at the time. The Freeh report-former FBI director Louis Freeh’s July 2012 inquiry on behalf of the Penn State board of trustees into why Sandusky’s crimes were not reported earlier by Paterno and other senior university officials-is addressed elsewhere in Posnanski’s biography and adds vital new information to the recollections in this excerpt. What follows is the story of Paterno’s final days as head coach, and of how he presented himself to his family and intimates during that period. This afforded Posnanski access to Paterno and his inner circle as the Jerry Sandusky scandal engulfed the campus and the nation. ![]() Editor’s Note: In the summer of 2011, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno allowed the journalist Joe Posnanski, then a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, to join him in State College, Pennsylvania, to spend the upcoming season writing his biography. ![]()
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