Paterno's passing marks the end of an era in college football

Joe Paterno died Sunday, and that's a predictable tragedy. Alabama legend Bear Bryant died less than two months after his final game with the Crimson Tide and like Paterno, who lasted just about as long, he lived to coach.

However unlike Bryant who treated his players like dogs, Paterno seemed to have a keener understanding of the human psyche.  He treated players like sons, and while that may not always win as many football games, it builds better men.

There was a big feature in Sports Illustrated (by Joe Posnanski, who was in State College this fall to write a biography of Paterno) a couple of years ago and it focused on one major point, Paterno’s goal, stemming from his father’s wishes for him, was to make an impact in life. And when that’s your goal, your charge isn’t just to winning games, a philosophy that’s lost on today’s what have you done for me lately sporting world.

It's sad to think that a man with the deserved historical stature of Joe Pa will have a big fat asterisk next to his name at least for a time, but when considering his life it will be impossible to ignore his tragic negligence in the Jerry Sandusky case. And don’t think I’m excusing him by saying this, but maybe he's been a bit too vilified for his role, either way though, this mistake is hardly of first line in his obituary significance.

Consider that no college football coach ever won as many games as Joe Pa. Consider that he stayed in one place for 46 years, spurning the NFL multiple times due to his life long quest to make an impact.

There will never be another Paterno. Just like there will never be another Bobby Bowden, or Bear Bryant, or Tom Osborne, or Bo Schembechler.

The firing of Paterno marked the end of an era. Coaching college football these days is too hard on the body and the mind for any one coach to have real longevity. The era of the long term icon coach is now long gone. And that's really too bad, because these guys represented everything that's good about the game. When they preached commitment it meant something because they had built their program from the ground up and by building it, they had proven their own commitment.

Joe Paterno built Penn State's football program from nothing and made it a powerhouse. He was left for dead in 2004 after winning seven games in two years, but he recovered and put together some excellent teams down the home stretch of his career.

I'll admit he was a bit of a punch line in the end, when he was much too old to be a major college football coach. He was probably not really doing much strategically and the Sandusky scandal certainly illustrates a certain out of touch quality.

But the man deserved to coach until he was 85, and without the scandal he deserved to coach until the day he died, because he's a coaching icon on a scale that we will never again see. Because he had a rare quality in a person, he actually cared.  And he most definitely made an impact.