College Football: Somber Saturday

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- There's a pall over the college football landscape this weekend, as Joe Paterno has coached his last game.

How he went out, no one would have foretold. He had steadfastly maintained, sometimes sternly, that he would leave on his own terms. But Joe Pa lost his job Wednesday amid the fallout of a lurid sexual assault case against a former coach, and he won't be on the sidelines or in the coaching box in his signature thick glasses and blue windbreaker Saturday.

Big-time college football hasn't really experienced a bewildering event like this before, and it was made more jarring because it came out of a program that has been an old school beacon of integrity, for everything from the simple uniforms to a deified coach.

Joe Paterno

The legal courts (for those accused) and the court of public opinion (for Paterno) will decide what his legacy will be, and only time will tell if The Pennsylvania State University football program will remain prominent. And as much as people want to move past these events and think of the positive aspects of college football, the unspeakable acts allegedly committed against young boys by Jerry Sandusky on the Penn State campus still need to be addressed by the law. That legal process has gotten a late start at Penn State.

Paterno's storied accomplishments on the field will remain what they are for now: most victories (409) by a coach at a major program, two national championships and five unbeaten, untied seasons.

Penn State has a football game scheduled this weekend at home vs. Nebraska. Penn State is 8-1 and ranked 12th in the BCS standings. The Nittany Lions also are on track to win the Leaders Division of the Big Ten Conference, which means they would play the Legends Division winner for the first Big Ten playoff championship in Indianapolis next month. But Penn State probably is just thinking one game at a time now.

There are other football games in the country this weekend, and we will discuss them, starting with unbeaten No. 7 Oregon at No. 4 Stanford. The season picks record stands at 28-18.