Jul 23, 2014 2 min read

Jay Paterno is feeling unwanted, and he wants Penn State to pay.

Paterno and another former Penn State assistant football coach who worked under Paterno’s legendary-but-tarnished father, Joe, are seeking $1 million each in damages in a federal lawsuit because they say the university’s handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal has left them blackballed in the coaching fraternity.

The younger Paterno and Bill Kenney said they’ve been tainted with guilt by association, and that the university has been complicit in this, to the point that they have failed to get numerous coaching jobs for which they have applied.

Kenney has, in fact, gotten an assistant’s job at Western Michigan University but says he’s earning much less than he would if he had been hired at another university with a football program the size of Penn State’s. Jay Paterno says he applied for nearly a half-dozen head-coaching jobs but was not granted an interview for any of them.

According to the lawsuit, Kenney, during job interviews, was asked about the Sandusky scandal. Of course he was. Prospective employers would not be doing their due diligence and protecting their institutions if they didn’t ask, “Hey, did you have any knowledge of what was going on with Sandusky?”

It’s also worth noting that seven of Joe Paterno’s assistant coaches who were serving at the time when the scandal broke have managed to secure other employment in college football, most of them at its highest levels.

We wonder how much blame Jay Paterno places on his father, whose “see-no-evil” approach, in conjunction with others at Penn State, put the safety of children behind the interests of the almighty football program. The answer to that, of course, is none at all.

And has he given any thought to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there were better candidates for those jobs he sought?

We’re left to surmise that it’s simply easier to hire an attorney and blame someone else.