Joe Paterno Loses Halo

The headline isn’t metaphorical, and it’s not about the innocence being gone at Penn State. It’s literal: The halo above Joe Paterno’s head on the Heister Street mural in State College is gone. It was painted over early Saturday morning.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after

There was a problem with all of this to begin with, and it has little to do with the sex abuse scandal and the fallout. The mural is nice, and a part of the State College community. But deifying Joe Paterno, living or not, has always seemed a little ... off.

The statue that was erected while he was still living and coaching, the mural that implied Paterno was a pure angel and the way the former Penn State coach was viewed never really made sense -- at least to an outsider. He was a human, not above the trials and tribulations the rest of the world faces.

Elevating Paterno’s stature to an image of perfection was unnecessary. So yeah, the halo is gone. But it should’ve never been there in the first place.