Joe Paterno Dies, ESPN Decides Football Wins Trump Abused Children

The cause given is lung cancer, I prefer to think it was shame and regret.

A genuinely contemptible memorial from ESPN:

In the span of 12 weeks, Joe Paterno transformed from beloved Penn State icon to Rorschach test on child abuse to ailing victim. His fate, the one that awaits us all, arrived with charitable swiftness. As tough as Paterno could be, at 85 years of age he proved no match for cancer.

 The Rorschach Inkblot Test is designed to measure psychological response to ambiguous designs, the interpretation purporting to reveal something about the psychology of the viewer.

How covering up child rape in your locker room equates to a Rorschach Test is beyond me.  I don't see many shades of grey open to various interpretations there.  It's like looking at a high res image of a skull-
Yep, that's a skull alright!

A man's death demands that we look to his life -- not just the last 12 weeks, swollen and inflamed by the heat of the vengeful -- but 62 years of coaching young men at one university. A legacy covers more than 12 weeks.

Y'know, if someone commits a murder, that's kinda their legacy whatever else they've done or will do.  When you cover up for a serial child molester to protect your football program, that is your defining characteristic forevermore.

The rest is a bunch of gibberish, the kind of thing you find on internet forums when someone feels compelled to mount a passionate defense of the indefensible.
Like this-

Yet a legion of men, who know him much better than any of his critics, continues to defend him. Some are gray of hair and round of stomach, others are younger than Paterno's five children. All of them wore blue and white. They arose to stand by his side when Paterno no longer could stand up for himself. Paterno was the coach who molded them. He instilled a beacon of light to guide them in their lives. He was the man who made them men.

See, lots of people clinging to their perceptions of someone over the concrete reality of his behavior means...uh, something.

You can be a spectacularly effective football coach AND a monster.
I don't understand the insistence that being a great coach means being a fine, upstanding human being. On the contrary, Paterno's position as The Man created the pressure that inspired him to cover up for and protect Sandusky at the expense of his past and future victims.

That this subsequently (and deservedly) destroyed his reputation strikes me as justice of the only sort he's likely to encounter.  That some people consider even this small recompense too large a price to pay for aiding and abetting child rape speaks volumes about the degenerate culture surrounding big time college athletics.