STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Penn State opened its season Saturday with the usual energy around Beaver Stadium, a new coach in Matt Campbell and plenty of optimism in the parking lots. But even as the school keeps pushing its football story forward, another chapter is about to land back in the spotlight.
On Tuesday, Jerry Sandusky is expected to make his first public appearance since 2019 at an evidentiary hearing in Bellefonte, just 10 miles north on I-99. The 82-year-old, who is serving a lengthy prison term for child abuse, will appear remotely from prison. The timing is impossible to ignore: the hearing comes only five days after Penn State opened the Paterno Family Football Experience Room exhibit at the school’s sports museum.
For plenty of people around the program, that’s a story they’d rather leave buried.
“I don’t know why (the news) just can’t leave things alone,” said Scott A. Noerr, a 73-year-old season-ticket holder since the 1960s. “It’s past, it’s over.”
Noerr, wearing shoulder-length gray hair and an Abbey Road-style shirt with Paterno placed in John Lennon’s spot, said most locals no longer react to the scandal the way they once did. Penn State senior Oscar Felegy said he hasn’t heard Sandusky come up on campus.
“I feel like it doesn’t really affect anything we do,” Felegy said.
That distance is part of the story now. Since the university took down the bronze Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium in 2012, it has gradually found ways to bring pieces of his legacy back without fully throwing the doors open.
A one-second Paterno clip returned to the pregame video in 2014. Video tributes marked the 50th anniversary of his first game in 2016.
In 2022, display cases around Beaver Stadium showed off his black shoes. Last fall, interim coach Terry Smith wore a pin that read “JOE” vertically and “409” horizontally, a reference to Paterno’s FBS-record win total.
Time has changed the people around the program, too. In the 15 years since Sandusky was arrested and 14 years since Paterno died of cancer, Penn State has had three university presidents, three athletic directors and five head coaches. Most current students were too young to feel the scandal the way older fans did; in November 2011, they were only 4 to 10 years old.
In the parking lots Saturday, a small group of 17- and 18-year-olds from Virginia said exactly that. “I’m here to be a PSU fan,” one said. Another added: “Sometimes we just gotta forget stuff and just play some football.”
The football side of the day went the way Penn State wanted, with a 45-0 win over Marshall in Campbell’s debut. But Tuesday’s hearing pulls the conversation back to a period that still shadows the school, even for people who would rather not revisit it.
“I wish we could never talk about (Sandusky) again,” said 22-year-old fan A.J. Guzzardi, sitting on the metal bleachers where Paterno’s statue once stood. “It was so long ago and what he did was so despicable, I don’t even really want to hear his name anymore.”
Back in late 2011, there was no way to separate the scandal from the school, the team or the town. Paterno’s success on the field and reputation off it had helped build the idea that Penn State could win while doing things the right way - or, as his slogan put it, “Success with honor.”
Retired faculty member Jack Selzer said Paterno’s values came to define what the community wanted to be.
“He was one thing that we had that everyone else wanted,” Selzer said.
When the scandal reached Paterno, that identity took a direct hit. The pain was personal because he was never just a coach to Penn State.
The fallout spread through the university itself. Selzer, the founding director of the Paterno Fellows Program, said the school became more cautious after the scandal.
“I personally feel that the university became a more guarded place,” he said. “Before that, we didn’t even have many university lawyers; then all of a sudden you needed legal clearances and permissions and ID cards for everything.
“The sense of aspiration seemed to be gone. In my opinion, we became a more risk-averse university after that.”
What happens Tuesday at the Centre County Courthouse will be only a small piece of the larger case. Sandusky is not leaving prison anytime soon. The hearing is tied to the recanting of testimony from one of the 10 victims named in the criminal charges, and dozens of other men later settled civil lawsuits with Penn State over abuse allegations involving Sandusky.
Still, the hearing is another reminder that Penn State’s past remains complicated, no matter how carefully the school packages its history.
That complexity is part of why the new exhibit matters so much to people like Dale Krug, a 68-year-old Penn State graduate who sat across from Beaver Stadium on Saturday wearing a JVP shirt with Paterno’s initials. Krug said he was moved to tears while spending more than 30 minutes reflecting on Paterno’s impact.
“I hope the museum exhibit really gives a true image of Joe as a person, as a human being, and his care and concern for the students,” Krug said. “Not what they did in the time that they were here, but what they did with their lives in terms of contributing to society.”
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