Blue White Illustrated

By the fall of 2011, those three associate athletic directors had retired, but the number of associate athletic director positions had increased to eight. Three had been promoted from within the department; two had come from another university division; and three came from national searches, including Penn State graduate Greg Myford (1986). Myford returned to campus in November 2004 after nearly 20 years of marketing experience in professional sports before becoming the associate athletic director of business relations and communications. What's significant is the two newest associate athletic directors had no connection to Penn State. Matt Stolberg, a graduate of Duquesne (1990), had extensive experience at Michigan, Michigan State and Northwestern when he was hired in January 2010 as associate athletic director for compliance and student affiliate services. Furthermore, the position had been upgraded to associate athletic director after the retirement of John Bove, a former assistant coach under Paterno who was an assistant athletic director for compliance for nearly 20 years. Charmelle Green became associate athletic director and senior woman administrator in June 2011, succeeding Sue Delaney-Sheetz, who had won two national championships when she was Penn State's women's lacrosse coach in the 1980s. Green, a Utah grad and one-time softball player and coach, had previously spent six years in Notre Dame's athletic administration. After those two hires, the position of associate athletic director for administration was eliminated with the sudden dismissal of Mark Sherburne, a former Penn State football player and 21-year employee, for reasons that have not been explained by acting athletic director Dave Joyner. If Freeh's investigation was as thorough as he claimed, his investigators should have been aware of Penn State's hiring trends. One can surmise the exclusion of this fact in his report was to rationalize his sweeping criticism of what he called the "Penn State Culture." The culture supposedly allowed the athletic department to "live by their own rules," and defy university policy and procedures. In fact, Freeh went even further on page 139 of his report, stating that "there was little personnel turnover or hiring from outside the university and strong internal loyalty." It also seems to me that his recommendation about national searches and his comment on hiring practices are part of Freeh's effort to support his insinuation that former athletic director Tim Curley nurtured this allegedly defiant culture and insistence on internal hiring. Yet Curley, a former Penn State walk-on football player who rose through the athletic department to become its leader in 1994, is responsible for the change in hiring strategy and philosophy that led to the arrival of all those associate athletic directors and head coaches, except for O'Brien. The Freeh report also turned up absolutely no evidence during Curley's tenure that "there was little personnel turnover" in the department. I doubt Freeh's people searched through even an objective sampling of the hundreds of past and present employee files since 1998, the year of Sandusky's first known incident, to make such an assessment. As he did with most of his report, Freeh relied strictly on hearsay and unsworn comments by select witnesses. According to a highly placed source, of the 350 or so employees in the Penn State athletic department in 2010-11 school year, approximately 50 had been there for 10 years or more and nearly 20 others had transferred from positions elsewhere in the university. About 115 had come from outside of Penn State, leaving perhaps some 165, many of them in lower-paid staff and auxiliary positions, whose backgrounds are not clear. If one eliminates the head and assistant coaches, associate athletic directors, other senior administrators and some staffers brought in by new SEE PRATO PAGE 60

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