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Joe Paterno Dies a Tarnished Legend

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Perhaps the most ironic element when looking at the way Joe Paterno lost his job as Penn State's football coach after 46 seasons lies in the fact that Paterno, as a young man, had his eyes set on law school.

The fallout in 2011 from the child sex-abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, who was an assistant on Paterno's Penn State staff until 1999, prompted the university's Board of Trustees to fire Paterno, then 84, with three games left in the regular season. Paterno, who died Sunday at age 85, was criticized for not going to law enforcement in 2002 once he was told by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary that McQueary had seen Sandusky allegedly sexually abusing a young boy in a shower on campus.

"I didn't know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to...

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