Removing Joe Paterno’s statue: A PR No-Brainer.

As if the conviction of former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was not enough of a PR nightmare, the release of the Freeh report detailing Penn State officials’ involvement in the covering up of Sandusky’s crimes made things much worse. The 267-page report  released on July 12 named Penn state officials such as university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and the beloved and revered head football coach Joe Paterno. 

Since the release of the report several groups have made attempts to distance themselves from Joe Pa. First, Nike announced they would remove Paterno’s name from their Child Development Center. Brown University, Paterno’s alma mater, decided to take Paterno’s name off their annual award recognizing the top performing freshmen student athlete. The most recent group were Penn State students who announced that they would re-name the tent village that pops up every year the night before football season tickets go on-sale “Nittanyville”, instead of its previous name, “Paternoville.”

These groups recognize the damage that associating with Paterno can cause to their image and have made the necessary steps to remove themselves from the situation. Despite all of the changes Penn State had prior, made it was clear that  Joe Paterno’s statue had to come down.

Penn State can never make what happened go away and can never repair the lives of the victims that Sandusky and those who let him run free destroyed. However, it can prove to the world that it cares about these victims, its students, and the community more than it cares about winning football games.

Much of this scandal has been a PR disaster as Penn State struggled to jump to any conclusions or make any rash and insensitive moves before finding out the truth.

After the release of the Freeh report there should not have been much discussion. The only sensible move to maintain Penn State’s fragile relationship with the public was to remove the statue. One could argue it took them too long as they initially decided to keep the statue up and a week later announced its removal 

If PR is all about building and maintaining relationships with your publics than the only logical move was to remove the statue and cut any ties the university has with Joe Paterno’s name, no matter how much fun it was to win all those games. 


This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Matt Jones

Severe Punishments for Bountygate: Crisis Management at its Finest

The “bounty” scandal, or bountygate as it is becoming known, of the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints has been considered by many different sports media outlets, such as ESPN, CBS, and Sports Illustrated, to be one of the worst scandals not only in NFL history, but in all of sports. The “bounty” program refers to a system set up and run by players where cash rewards were paid out to players who successfully injured or “knocked out” other players from a game. However, many consider the worst part of the program to be that Saints management and coaches knew about and encouraged the program. As a result, the league last week handed down draconian punishments that included a one year suspension for Saints head coach Sean Payton, an eight game suspension for General Manager Mickey Loomis, and an indefinite suspension for Gregg Williams, who was the coach that initially instituted the bounty program to the Saints when he was their defensive coordinator.

The significance of this scandal is that it does great damage to the NFL’s recent attempts to revamp its image and stance in regards to safety. Football, by nature, is a physical game with a high injury rate. Traditionally, the NFL has encouraged this physicality and has paid little attention to the overall and long term health of its players. However, recent research about head trauma and a class action lawsuit from retired players about the NFL’s negligence towards player safety have brought the issue to the game’s forefront. In response, the NFL has slowly introduced new tackling and equipment rules to try and protect players. In addition, new procedures have been put into place to ensure that players suffering from concussions are fully healed before they return to playing. The NFL was trying to reinvent itself to show that it cared about safety and this new prioritization was supposed to trickle down to the lower levels so that over time the game would become safer for everyone to play.
Then the bounty scandal happened.

The scandal showed that nothing had changed. The fact that it existed for so long and that coaches and players knew about it and encouraged it set an awful example for the lower levels of the game. The “bounty” system undermined the NFL’s attempts to establish itself as a safety first league.

The NFL, however, recognized the damage the scandal caused to its image and its “role model” status and this is why it punished those involved so hard. The Saints are one of the more popular franchises in the league, Payton is one of the best known and most respected coaches in the NFL, and to top it off, this year’s Super Bowl will be held in New Orleans. The last thing the NFL wanted to do was to hurt the Saints franchise, but it had to prove to all the high school and college players and their parents that the NFL is serious about safety. These harsh and severe punishments can be seen as a PR move by the NFL to respond to the image hit it took as a result of the scandal. They send the message that the NFL holds safety above all else, including the money it makes off the Saints franchise.

Bountygate shows us that when it comes to crisis management, the right decisions are rarely the easy ones. The NFL could have pretended like nothing happened and they would have continued to make heaps of money off the Saints. However, the league knew that its image as a role model for younger players was its top priority and therefore delivered a decision that will help the overall health of the league, even though it may not look that way right now.

This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Matt Jones.