It’s no secret: Naming Penn State’s football field after Joe Paterno is a bad idea

Here’s how you know that the proposal to name the football field at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium after Joe Paterno is a terrible idea: No one knew about it. No one knew the idea existed, because no one had tried to make the case out in the open first. The people reportedly lobbying for it — a cluster of university trustees — wanted to keep their campaign quiet, and they were apparently willing to flout Pennsylvania law to make their case behind closed doors, and that’s reason enough to tell them to stick it.

Spotlight PA did Thursday what it’s supposed to do, revealing that these trustees had met twice in January with university officials to discuss the football field’s name. These meetings may have violated state regulations that require Penn State’s board to deliberate in public, but even if these discussions were legal by the letter of the law, why wouldn’t these trustees declare their intentions and sign their names to it? Why wouldn’t they shout their mission statement from the top of Mount Nittany? Why would they want this attempt to honor Paterno, to restore his name and reputation to their once-pristine condition, to remain a secret?

The questions answer themselves. Only the most blinkered of Penn State football fans could believe that enough time had passed to pursue this. Only someone chugging from a keg of blue-and-white Kool-Aid could rationalize that enough pain had subsided to make it appropriate to splash Paterno’s name across the stadium — across the 106,572-seat symbol of the blindness and warped priorities that helped create both the cover for Jerry Sandusky to sexually abuse children and the hesitancy to step forward and stop him. Better you name a Massachusetts CYO rec center after a Boston bishop.

Less than a decade and a half has passed since the fall of 2011, when the scope of Sandusky’s evil was laid bare and Paterno was fired. And the urge to dismiss or downplay Paterno’s role and responsibility in the scandal — his awareness that Sandusky was showering with children in 1998 and his inaction in the wake of that knowledge — seems barely to have subsided.

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That impulse is nothing but human nature at work. Paterno was Penn State’s head coach for 45 years, and for winning 409 games and two national championships, for cultivating an image of himself as a caretaker of more than just a college football program, for framing himself as the morally righteous overseer of a “grand experiment” in academics and athletics, he became a god. The truest believers never want to consider that their god is flawed, because the recognition forces them not only to see their idol in a new and discomfiting light, but also to turn that same light on themselves. It’s too harsh a glare for some to stand. They’d prefer to retreat to the comfort of what they used to know.

That’s all this proposal is: another attempt to use the atrocity of Sandusky’s crimes to make people feel better about the way they once felt, and maybe still feel, about Paterno and Penn State football. It’s another attempt to further an agenda that has nothing to do with remaining vigilant against a culture that could turn corrupt, nothing to do with making sure something like a predator having free rein never happens again.

The NCAA did the same thing when it abused its power in trying to punish Paterno and Penn State for sins that had no connection or relevance to the association’s rules. Now these trustees dare to presume that they can start rehabilitating Paterno’s image, even though there’s no groundswell of support for such a campaign, no clamoring to bring Paterno’s statue out of mothballs and display it again, no consensus that Paterno had been done wrong by Louis Freeh or Centre County prosecutors or anyone else. This is nothing but a grab for glory and redemption out of a tragedy where there was no glory to be found.

There is no need to update the field’s name for any reason, let alone to try to clean the stain from the record of a great coach but far from perfect man. The time isn’t right to do this. The time might never be. It’s unseemly. It’s a middle finger to the victims of Jerry Sandusky. It’s wrong. The trustees at the center of this campaign, whoever they are, are free to argue otherwise, of course. So here’s a challenge to them: Do it. Come forward and make your case. Stop doing this dirty work in the shadows.