Penn State's New Joe Paterno Exhibit Raises Fresh Questions About Legacy

Penn State is opening the Paterno Family Football Experience Room, which it says will honor the program's "history and tradition."

Penn State Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno is carried off the field after earning his 400th career victory by defeating the Northwestern Wildcats in 2010. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

There are a lot of places to start, so let’s start where everyone agrees.

Joe Paterno coached Penn State football for 46 years. He won 409 football games. He was a central figure in the lives of multiple generations of men and women who attribute much of how they approach their lives to the things Paterno taught them, directly or indirectly. He was an influential part of the cultural identity of an entire town and to one of the nation’s respected academic institutions.

These things are true.

And so Penn State, which has operated an all-sports museum for decades, was always going to reach a moment where it would have to address Paterno’s legacy. Part of the job of museums is to make an accounting for someone’s place in history. Penn State can’t accurately record its own history and omit a man who is a foundational piece of it.

But this new museum exhibit, which opens Sept. 3 at Beaver Stadium and is named for the Paterno family, prompts some questions about what it does, or rather doesn’t, address.

Nowhere in the coverage of the Paterno Family Football Experience Room — not in the press release, the remarks by Athletic Director Pat Kraft, nor in any description of what's actually in the exhibit — is there any indication that it addresses the more complicated aspects of Paterno’s story.

At this point, the trenches have been dug for far too long for anyone to be swayed about their interpretation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and Paterno’s firing in 2011. That relitigation won’t happen here.

But the question lingers: Does any part of this room mention the Sandusky scandal, even in passing?

The Paterno Family Football Experience Room, an interactive collection, honoring the history and tradition of Penn State Football, is coming to Beaver Stadium. #WeAre | https://t.co/UzaMFhhrmK pic.twitter.com/O6lyBjSoPT

— Penn State Athletics (@GoPSUsports) September 1, 2026

That’s the part worth sitting with. There’s a difference between not addressing something and moving on from something. Addressing it implies a degree of internal reckoning, an acknowledgement of faults and complexities and the creation of an environment where both the good and the bad can live. 

If the room does not address this history, that would be a different choice on Penn State’s part. It would be an active decision to leave something out. That wouldn’t be moving past hard questions and conversations; it would be choosing not to ask or have them. 

Silence in a commemorative space is not neutral. This becomes all the more relevant when you consider the room was financed by private donors with a “curated timeline” unlikely to be a full accounting of the pleasant and unpleasant.

Contrast that with what it would look like to actually move on. A single line on the timeline — even one sentence, even one that simply says the university's handling of the 2011 situation remains a subject of dispute and reflection — would cost the exhibit almost nothing. It would also be true. 

For Penn State to simply ignore one of the darkest years in program and university history would be a missed opportunity to embrace the complicated truths of its own past. And within that embrace might come actual institutional closure — the same closure Penn State sought in 2012, when it removed the Joe Paterno statue from its location outside Beaver Stadium by calling it “a source of division and an obstacle to healing in our University and beyond.”

Because acknowledging the full story isn’t erasing a long and otherwise positive legacy. It isn’t taking a side, and it’s not even a perpetual referendum on the institution’s failures. It's simply embracing what was with a hope for what was learned.

Time will tell, very soon, what kind of room this is. If the exhibit acknowledges 2011, Penn State will have shown that it can honor Paterno’s place in its history without sanitizing that history. If it does not, Penn State will have built a very nice room where the question doesn’t come up. And that won't have happened by mistake.

The Joe Paterno loyalists may have forgotten a few details… pic.twitter.com/dEeq71NJtj

— The Dan Le Batard Show (@LeBatardShow) September 2, 2026

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