<font size="2">Penn State football received the "Outside The Lines" treatment Sunday, and it made the once-admired program looked like a renegade outfit with its revered coach seemingly out of touch with his team and its players. The show found that since 2002, 46 Penn State players have been charged with 163 criminal complaints. Forty-five of those complaints resulted in guilty pleas or convictions. Of the 46 players charged, 27 pleaded guilty or were convicted. More recently, to show the problem is getting worse, 17 players were charged in 2007 with 72 crimes. Nine charges resulted in guilty pleas. The numbers screamed about a lack of control by the coaching staff and a lack of discipline by the players. To those who have followed Joe Paterno closely in recent years, his response was expected. "I think you've done an awful lot of probing which bothers me that you might be on a witch hunt," he said. Asked about the widely held belief that he has given up day-to-day control of the program, Paterno said, "I have the same hands on that I've always had." That's quite a statement coming from a coach who freely admits he often works from home. To prove that he doesn't have control of the program, interviewer Steve Delsohn pointed out to Paterno that in its investigative report of the brawl Judicial Affairs wrote that two players said "all members of the team [were] sent a text message from the head coach threatening to remove them from the team if they came in to Judicial Affairs to speak to its director." Paterno's response to that attempt to circumvent the judicial process was that he doesn't know how to text message and that "I don't even have a computer." Clearly, the message came from someone else in authority using Paterno's name without Paterno's permission. On such an important matter, that is grounds for firing. But as near as can be determined, no punishment was handed out and, for certain, no one in authority was fired. Just another case of a lack of institutional control, which all goes back to Paterno. The most damning part of Paterno's statement was that the man supposedly overseeing a major football program that produces tens of millions of dollars in revenue and is the face of the university for many followers does not know how to operate a computer. The show was a damning indictment that had to leave Penn State officials both furious and embarrassed. It also might be all that was needed to push Paterno into retirement after this season, whether that's what he wants to or not. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</font>