The objective of the present study was to assess whether there is a positive association between expectations about off-field conduct set by the team coach and the likelihood that college football players intend to engage as prosocial bystanders in the prevention of what they consider to be inappropriate sexual behavior. In a sample of U.S. collegiate football players ( N = 3,281), a path analysis model tested the association between coach expectations, perceived likelihood of discipline for off-field transgressions, and likelihood of intending to intervene to prevent inappropriate sexual behavior. Mediation of these relationships by the athlete's sense of exploitative entitlement and their attitudes about intervening were also assessed. Findings supported the hypothesized relationships, with expectations and discipline associated with bystander intentions both directly and indirectly through the mediating pathways of entitlement and attitudes about intervening. These findings provide evidence about the important role that sports team coaches can play in encouraging bystander intervention by clarifying expectations and consequences for conduct off the field of play. Athletic departments can provide a framework within which coaches are informed about the importance of setting and enforcing standards for off-field behavior, and are appropriately incentivized to do so.
Head varsity football coach Dan Cooper was initially placed on non-disciplinary leave alongside assistant coach Greg Nadeau. However, in a statement released Wednesday, Brunswick Superintendent Phillip Potenziano announced Cooper had been fired from his post and the remaining football season had been cancelled. Potenziano also confirmed a number of students had also been removed from the team.
Sex On The Football Field
In the video, Kay was standing on a football field wearing Webb's jersey as she pointed to the sky. Her loved ones then came up behind her and poured blue Gatorade on her, revealing that she will mother a boy.
Kay had announced in August that she was pregnant with Webb's baby, a month after the football star died during a cliff-diving accident at the age of 22. He had fallen and hit his head near Triangle Lake, about 35 miles from the University of Oregon's campus in Eugene.
Forty-three years ago, Penn State University played for its first national championship in a football season that began against Temple on Sept. 1, 1978, and ended against second-ranked Alabama, on Jan. 1, 1979. It was the season in which Penn State football became Penn State Football, a season that saw head coach Joe Paterno become an American icon. It was also a season that saw a serial sexual predator attack multiple Penn State students.
His name was Todd Hodne, and he was perhaps the most dangerous predator ever to play college football. "I have been a prosecutor for nearly 30 years," wrote John B. Collins, who prosecuted one of Hodne's crimes, in a letter to a parole board. "I have prosecuted serial killers and capital cases. Todd Hodne, to this day, remains among the three most dangerous, physically imposing and ruthless excuses for a human being I have ever faced in court."
Hodne arrived in State College in 1977 as a prized recruit from New York's Long Island, and in 1978, he was the Penn State Rapist. There were other rapes and rapists; Penn State, in the mid- and late seventies, was enduring an epidemic of sexual assault that female students of the day still talk about. But even against that backdrop, Hodne's rapes and attacks stand out because he was a football player who, according to one family member, "had no control over his dark impulses." He was big and strong, entitled and enabled. He was driven and determined and a little desperate. He was also cruel, the most predatory of predators, a hunter who liked to linger. He attacked with a knife to the throat, and when he attacked women, he made sure they couldn't see him, but he also liked to suggest they knew him. "Do you recognize my voice?" he'd asked Karen.
The next day, Hodne showed up at the police station, saying he heard two of his friends were in some trouble and wanted to visit them in jail. According to a police report, he first said his name was "Tom Harris." Then he changed his mind and "stated that his name was Todd Hodne ... that he was a Penn State football player and that he did not want his name out." He was leaving the station when an officer told him he matched the description of the man who fled the Record Ranch burglary. The officer asked for permission to take a photograph of him, and Hodne agreed. Hodne drove back to Wantagh and, in his absence, was identified in a photographic lineup. When he returned to State College, he was arrested, and on June 21, he, along with his friend from the neighborhood, were charged and later convicted with felonies. "He ruined my life," says Poggioli, who wound up pleading to a misdemeanor. "But he ruined so many lives. I feel lucky to have gotten out when I did. I feel lucky compared to the others."
It was not a violent crime. But it was a felony, and Joe Paterno was a coach who called players into his office even when he heard they were not participating in classroom discussions. He was a disciplinarian, and there would have to be discipline. On Aug. 19, 1978, two months after the burglary, Penn State held a scrimmage, and afterward, Paterno told gathered reporters that Todd Hodne had been suspended for the season. But he did not like to give up on his players, and he did not give up on Hodne. In his announcement, Paterno said that Hodne will be able to return to the team "if he has a good academic year and if he proves to us that [the robbery] was a mistake." He also sought to provide Hodne a role model for his sophomore season, and to that end, one of his seniors, Fred Ragucci, was summoned into the football office. Ragucci went to a Catholic high school on Staten Island, and now he played defensive end for Paterno. When Ragucci was told he would have a new roommate in Hamilton Hall, he didn't blink, even though he was two years older than Hodne and was not part of his crowd. Ragucci could figure out easily enough why he wound up in this unlikely pairing: "I was a pretty good student. I was pretty straight, never in any trouble. Nobody specifically mentioned this to me, but I think they were trying to put people in with people who might be a good influence."
Hodne was extreme in everything, in particular the activity that so many football players took as a privilege of being on the roster. "He had some wild sexual appetites," the freshman roommate says. "We had bunk beds, and I'm on the bottom, he's on the top. And he'd be up there going at it for hours at a time. It just wasn't normal. I mean, I knew something was definitely different in that aspect."
It was not a flattering moniker. Shemp was the fourth Stooge. Hodne had endured the meat grinder anonymity of freshman football and then had been suspended. Kip Vernaglia, one of the players who hung out with him, remembers Hodne as a "happy-go-lucky knucklehead kind of guy." Years later, when we told him of the full extent of Hodne's crimes, Vernaglia said, "Are you serious? ... he was Shemp!"
Adrienne Reissman was a student at Penn State and a waitress at the Train Station. She kept her car parked close by, in the alley behind the restaurant. One night after work in the fall of 1978, she was walking out to the alley in the dark. She remembers what she was wearing because she has asked herself so many times what she looked like that night, what he might have seen. "What woman doesn't ask what she looked like?" she asks now. "Was I a target? Was I trashy?" She was wearing "black slacks and a tan sweater with suede patches at the elbows." She was 24 years old. She was 5 feet tall. She was an artist and a self-described hippie. She didn't know the football players who came into the Train Station because she didn't particularly care about them: "I was not boom-boom rah-rah."
Until this point, Hodne had remained a Penn State student despite his suspension from the football team on Aug. 19, had remained on scholarship and lived at 279 Hamilton Hall with Fred Ragucci. It took a few hours for the police to produce a warrant for his arrest. At the end of Oct. 13, the lead investigator on the case, Duane Musser, wrote a report summarizing the efforts that he and his partner, Garry Kunes, had made to find Hodne:
"At 1920 hours Off. Kunes contacted Joe Paterno in an attempt to determine the location of Hodne since Hodne rooms with Fred Ragucci, a PSU football player. Paterno indicated that he would attempt to determine this by contacting Ragucci. Paterno asked to be recontacted on Sunday 10/15/78 at 1830 hours for further information."
In Karen's mind, the horror of the attack would always coincide with fond memories of her last summer in State College. Jean was dating Penn State defensive end Clyde Corbin, and Karen often accompanied them when they went to downtown bars like The Saloon for pitchers of beer. Karen had a lot of friends and a job she liked at the Centre Daily Times, but that summer she also socialized with football players. It was part of what made the summer special. It also was part of what left her with a lifetime of questions: How did her attacker know she was home alone? How did a football player know she was home alone? Why did her attacker ask if she recognized his voice? Had she met him before? Did he have an accomplice?
Paterno was in charge of discipline on the Penn State football team. "Sometimes they felt that because they were football players, they'd be getting special treatment," Lee Upcraft, university assistant vice president for student affairs at the time, says of players who got in trouble. "But they were more worried about Joe Paterno than they were of me, let's put it that way. Joe could just do anything he wanted and nobody was going to question him."
Paterno kept his own counsel and maintained his own doghouse, which had a number of rooms. The main room was for players who drank, who fought, who put their fists through windows, who had done "something stupid" and embarrassed him. These he punished at practice by making them run the steps of Beaver Stadium or wear the dreaded white jersey of "the foreign team." "If you messed up, you'd find it in your locker," says Tony Capozzoli. The second room was for players who were flunking out. These he sent to academic advisers and, if they proved themselves immune to intervention, dropped from the team. The final room was for those who either never left the first two or had made the newspapers by breaking the law. These he suspended unilaterally. He was not in the habit of consulting with his coaches during his deliberations; he only informed them of their result. "He would say, 'All we have to do is pretend he sprained his ankle yesterday and go on,'" remembers Booker Brooks, one of his longtime assistant coaches. But the players, the press and everybody else in the sphere of Penn State football would know that beyond incurring Paterno's displeasure, the player had been deemed unworthy. He had been excommunicated. He had been, in a phrase repeated again and again in any discussion of Paterno's decisive discipline, "sent home." 2ff7e9595c
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