The Big Ten on Monday removed Joe Paterno's name from the football championship trophy that will be handed out after the conference's inaugural football title game. It's just the latest in the sudden and precipitous fall of a once-legendary figure, whose name is now badly tarnished, if not permanently ruined.

Some 10 years, 20 years from now, what will people think of Joe Paterno? Probably not the same way he was thought of two weeks ago: A football icon who has done everything the right way, never incurring even a sniff from the NCAA and has sent countless young men into professional football and the world at large as upstanding citizens. Now, and perhaps forever, Paterno would be thought of as someone who at the very least was complicit in enabling a pedophile.

When Woody Hayes struck Clemson's Charlie Bauman at the Gator Bowl in 1978 and got fired shortly afterward, his name was briefly tarnished. But many years later, it's not the first thing people think of Hayes, who remains an icon, if flawed. Conversely, despite all his success on the football field and in the television and movie business, O.J. Simpson is now always remembered more for the double murder for which he was not convicted.

Our list this week is simple: Top 10 Tarnished Legacies. Some sports figures who did horrible things are not on the list simply because they hadn't accomplished much, so there's little legacy to tarnish. The ones that made it were at one time towering figures but would be later discredited so thoroughly by events that they were no longer heroes, but villains.