The University of Tennessee apparently wasn’t ready to tackle the fallout over hiring Ohio State assistant Greg Schiano to coach the school’s football team.
Though Schiano would have brought bonafides from a successful run at Rutgers and a less-successful stint with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he would have brought something else, too.
Fans and critics were quick to express their outrage when word broke of the school’s memorandum of understanding with their intended replacement for Butch Jones. At issue was Schiano’s connection to Penn State working under former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who was ultimately convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse.
As the Washington Post reports, former Nittany Lions assistant coach Mike McQueary testified in a 2015 deposition that another Penn State coach had told him that Schiano had talked of seeing Sandusky abusing a boy in the early 1990s.
This is Trip Underwood. He painted the Rock. He’s says it’s “A bigger thing than football, it comes down to morals in general.” pic.twitter.com/LZJzkM7Hzl
— Louis Fernandez Jr (@LouisWBIR) November 26, 2017
Schiano later denied that account. ” I never saw any abuse, nor had reason to suspect any abuse, during my time at Penn State,” he told ESPN last year.
McQueary himself had testified in Sandusky’s 2012 criminal case that he had told Penn State coach Joe Paterno of seeing Sandusky rape a boy in 2001.
Whether or not Schiano had seen such an incident and not reported it to police, just the possibility was enough to galvanize Tennessee detractors.
On the school’s campus, a protester pained the famed “rock” with the message, “Schiano covered up child rape at Penn State.”
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