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Here’s The Entire Freeh Report In One Devastating Image

The enormity of the Freeh report and its heartbreaking conclusions are hard to fathom. We here at SportsGrid tried to cover all the bases today — from the horrifying realizations to the reactions of heavyweights like Nike and Bobby Bowden — but nobody in a lifetime could possibly explain the actions, or lack thereof, taken by the Penn State administration during Jerry Sandusky’s era of terror. One way to digest the Freeh report, I think, is through this word visualization.

You may be familiar with “word clouds,” which are normally fun, colorful bubbles that give greater prominence to words appearing more frequently in the source text. Here, we can see the entire 267-page Freeh report laid out like a maze of iniquity (via USA Today Sports):

What can this tell us? It certainly doesn’t explain Joe Paterno’s silence in the face of such horror. It doesn’t make sense of a group of adults favoring prestige over the safety of children. It doesn’t untangle the messy trail of lies, omissions and cover-ups that Penn State has left in its wake.

What is most noticeable, clearly, is the word “University.” It’s the largest word, and that means it was the word used most often throughout the report. Because that was the entity that truly let us down here: the university. It’s very easy — and yes, completely correct — to blame the individuals in this situation. Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, Tim Curley, Mike McQueary and countless others failed their responsibilities as decent human beings and should be faulted. But they were enabled by a monstrosity of a system that allowed for such mistakes. The cult of personality around Paterno, and the reverence paid to the football program, created an insulted culture where protecting the school (and the people who ran it) trumped all. No one was held accountable because the men at fault were the ones swinging the gavel. That’s an unacceptable situation.

We would all like to say we would act differently if we had been there — and I hope to whatever higher power there is that we would. But the power of groupthink, “when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives” is stronger than we want to believe. As put in Matt Rudnitsky’s excellent rundown of the Freeh report, it was the Penn State Way that doomed the children. That’s bigger than any one person.

Here’s to hoping that a university never allows itself this kind of power again.

Follow @ericgoldschein