Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy has been sidelined with injuries for nearly all of last season and most of this season as well, but he just returned to practice this week. Although he was not made available to media in the locker room, he was recently interviewed by Men’s Journal, and had some extremely quotable things to say. A good portion of the interview focuses on Levy off the field—he is a bit of a football eccentric in that he does not eat, sleep, and breathe football 24/7—but it touched on football in a surprising way: his proudest moment from his college career at Wisconsin.
He was most famous for a 2006 play against Penn State, a sideline tackle that accidentally drove him into coach Joe Paterno, breaking JoePa’s left leg. Ten years later, Levy now calls that incident “my proudest moment in college,” as history has since revealed Happy Valley’s sad secrets. “That dirtbag, man,” says Levy of Paterno, who was recently implicated as being aware of child sexual abuse committed by his assistant Jerry Sandusky as early as 1976. “We’ve gotta stop prioritizing sports over humanity,” says Levy. “Just because somebody can throw a football or coach football, they’re excluded from their wicked acts.”
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Harsh words, but the underlying sentiment is unquestionably fair. Penn State certainly did prioritize sports over humanity when they covered for Jerry Sandusky and the more we learn from it, the more we see that Paterno was much more informed than he let on. One of Sandusky’s alleged victims, with whom Penn State settled, said in a deposition that he spoke directly with the former coach and told him that Sandusky molested him in the shower. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “the man testified that he was shocked by Mr. Paterno’s response, recalling that the iconic coach told him that he didn’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff because he had to focus on the upcoming football season.”
h/t Onward State
