Big Worm Keep on Turnin’

You might have heard about Kevin Slaten’s lengthy interview of NBC’s Bob Costas on KQQZ St. Louis last week, in which Costas admitted that his opinion about the Penn Situation has changed considerably since he voiced his original words on the subject.

Onward State has done a good job of summarizing that interview, publishing some of the meatier quotes from it. If you don’t have time to listen to the entire interview, read Kevin Horne’s piece. Here are a couple of Costas quotes:

“What Freeh did, it seems to me, was not only gather facts but he reached a conclusion which is at least debatable from those facts and than he assigned a motivation, not only to Curley and Schultz and Spanier, but he specifically assigned a very dark motivation to Joe Paterno, which seems like it might be quite a leap.”

“I think a lot of this, and how people responded to it, could be summed up in an exchange I had with Joe Posnanski…In many corners, Joe was pilloried for going too soft on Paterno in the book because his conclusion was that Paterno had come up short but had not been guilty of anything like Freeh alleged. You know what I think some of this comes down to? At least now, people are so repulsed by what Sandusky did and so startled that somebody, somehow, didn’t observe it, figure it out, and stop him, that they think that anything short of a blanket condemnation of everybody there somehow translated into you being insufficiently concerned about the victims, and insufficiently outraged by Sandusky’s behavior. So no shades of grey in degrees of culpability are permitted — the only way that you can spread your righteous indignation is to say damn them all. And that may be understandable, but it may not be fair.”

However, if you can spare the time, the whole radio interview is available here.