Joe Paterno is dead and the Penn State football program needs to join him.

Now. Not next year. Not next month. Not even next week. Now.

Penn State president Rodney Erickson needs to step in front of a bank of microphones and announce he is killing the program that put his school on the map. Someone high up at Penn State needs to finally do the right thing for once — even if it's 14 years too late. There is no other acceptable action in the wake of Thursday's release of the Freeh Report that chillingly and clinically details the full scope of the cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's child abuse at Penn State.

To let Penn State play another game of college football — to run out there in those once iconic royal blue and white uniforms with no names on the back — would be another abomination against the victims of Jerry Sandusky's horrific reign of terror.

Penn State cannot wait for the glacial-paced NCAA to act. No one needs to be left sitting around to see if those out-of-touch bureaucrats in Indianapolis will do the right thing and hit Paterno's program of shame with the death penalty. Penn State must disband its own football program first.

Sandusky will be going away for a long, long time. Penn State football needs to join him.

That's the only action that will even begin to show that all those in living in Happy Valley denial understand what their program has done. This is the worst scandal in college sports history — and scandal only hints at the full scope of it. Shielding a pedophile shouldn't be stacked up against recruiting violations, paying players or cheating on the field.

This isn't just a scandal. It's an atrocity.

Penn State cannot continue to play football after this. That the new administration is even thinking about that shows the school's remorse is still woefully lacking.

Beaver Stadium needs to stand empty next year and for several years to come, to sit there as a hulking 106,572-seat, echoing testament to the horror Paterno and the rest of Penn State's leadership unleashed on all those boys. The RV caravan that happily parades into State College every college football Saturday needs to cease.

Freeh — a former FBI director who interviewed hundreds of witnesses — uses the term "callous disregard" in the report, and that cuts right to the heart of Paterno's own massive role. The report obliterates all of JoPa's own living denials and should forever shut up his defenders.

July 12, 2012 is the day that any notion of Paterno as any sort of collateral "victim" of Sandusky dies.

The 267-page Freeh Report details how Paterno conspired to "conceal" Sandusky's abuse. All in the name of avoiding the "consequences of bad publicity." Paterno even wrote a letter, arguing that it was "not a football scandal" just a month before his death.

Paterno had the gall to claim that those arguing the football program was a bad influence on the university had it wrong.

Try telling that to the Penn State janitors in the Freeh Report afraid to come forward because of how powerful Penn State football is in that university, in that town, in that state.

"Take a moment for the janitors," Freeh said in a press conference on the report. "That's the tone on the bottom. The employees of Penn State who clean and maintain the locker rooms where young boys are being raped. They witness what I think is most horrific rape being described, and they panic. The janitor (who saw it) said, 'It's worst thing I ever saw.' He is a Korean War veteran, and he said, 'It makes me sick.'

"The other janitors are alarmed and shocked, but they say, 'We can't report this because we'll get fired.' They're afraid to go against it. If that's the culture on the bottom, God help the culture on the top."

Only God can help Paterno now. No one should be allowed to keep his football program alive.

Paterno's New Legacy

The Freeh Report details how Paterno and other Penn State leaders knew about allegations of child abuse against Sandusky as early as 1998. And that Paterno, former Penn State president Graham Spanier, suspended athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz "repeatedly concealed critical facts" that could have led to Sandusky being stopped more than a decade before he finally was.

No amount of money donated for a library makes up for something like this.

In the name of protecting Paterno and king football, Penn State let boys get raped and abused by a vile predator. A program like that cannot be allowed to play on. This is worse than former Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss going rogue and clumisly trying to cover up the murder of one of his players by another by discrediting the dead man.

This wasn't one twisted mid-level coach. This was a systematic cover-up of abuse, one in which the key players knew the absuer was still out there in contact with young boys. One that involves a legend.

If Penn State doesn't see enough here to disband its football program, the university is still roting from its core.

And I don't want to hear any talk about how I just don't understand Penn State. My wife went there. Some of our closest friends are alumni. I covered Big Ten sports for years and have spent more than my share of time in Happy Valley. I have the requiste cheesy pictures of my whole family in front of that Nittany Lion statue.

Penn State wants everyone to realize how great a university it is? Fine. Take a true stand, give Sandusky's shattered victims a true response, and lock the doors of the Nittany Lions' football facilities. This is a football program that is too rotted by the unbelievable disregard shown for hurt kids to do anything but be left to rot.

The football machine needs to stop in this sheltered Pennsylvania region. Paterno's "legacy" needs to be interrupted in a way that even death couldn't. Now.

Anything less is just more lip service, more spitting in the face of all those ruined lives.