Matt Millen says Paterno "died of a broken heart"

FROM KEITH GROLLER

Even on the Sunday of the conference championship games, ESPN's SportsCenter, fittingly, provided non-stop coverage of the passing of Joe Paterno on Sunday morning.

Matt Millen, Lou Holtz, Mike Ditka and Brett Musburger all weighed in with their thoughts and all of them basically agreed that Paterno died of a broken heart.

Millen, the Whitehall High grad who played for Paterno on some of his best teams in the late 1970s, said: "I just can't help but think he died of a broken heart and that bothers me.

"It's probably too hard to put into words, but just knowing what Joe was and how he conducted his life and how he operated daily; it was a daily, everyday thing for him ... the way it ended and for him to fall into this whole mess that's up there right now ... and hearing him say 'Looking back, I could have done more' ... I know this whole thing was just killing him. Those are the wrong words to say, but I don't know how else to say it."

Holtz said that he told his ESPN colleagues Rece Davis and Mark May that after being fired in the aftermath of the Sandusky scandal: "Joe would not live six months.He just wouldn't want to live because Penn State and football was his life. It was the same thing with Bear Bryant. Football was his life. Take it away and their will to live diminishes."

Ditka said: "Go throughout history and it's hard to find someone who made more of an impact ... on the youth of All-America, on the youth of Pennsylvania, on the youth of Penn State. He was Penn State.

"I agree with Matt. Sometimes the will to live leaves you at a certain age. They took away his love. His love was Penn State, his love was football, it was coaching. There could have been a better way to do. They did it their way. I disagreed with it. And I always will because I knew the man."

Musburger relayed a conversation he had with Paterno about retirement. Paterno, according to Musburger, said he feared being like Bear Bryant who died in January of 1983, less than a month after he coached his final game.

Musburger "there is no doubt" that the Sandusky scandal was a major factor in Paterno's passing.

"Outside of the family of the victims, no one felt worse about what had happened than Joe Paterno."

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