On Sunday afternoon, Penn State officials took down the statue of former football coach Joe Paterno after the Freeh Report revealed the university’s involvement in covering up sex-abuse allegations against assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. (Amy Davidson writes about the N.C.A.A.’s punishment for Penn State.) Over the course of the investigation, the nine-hundred-pound statue had become “a source of division and an obstacle to healing,” Penn State President Rodney Erickson said in a statement.

When the tribute to Paterno was erected, in 2001, he was still an untarnished hero on campus. He’d been the head coach of Penn State’s football team for thirty-five years, he’d won two national championships, and he’d just become the winningest coach in N.C.A.A. major college-football history.

At the time, Paterno was just joining the ranks of people who’d also had statues built in their honor while they were still alive, like Michael Jordan and Dolly Parton. But there’s a reason we normally wait until after people are dead and buried, and can no longer ruin their reputation, before we memorialize them. (Even George Washington had to wait more than thirty years after his death for his first monument to be completed.) Here’s a look at some other statues of living people that might just deserve to join Paterno’s in storage:

Rush Limbaugh

In May, Limbaugh joined the likes of Sacajawea and Mark Twain in the Hall of Famous Missourians at the state’s capitol building. Only Republicans were invited to the unveiling, as a group of Democrats had petitioned against it, specifically after Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut.” “Our friends, so-called friends on the other side of the aisle, are deranged,” he said at the ceremony. The state has since invested more than a thousand dollars in a security camera to protect the bronze bust.

Albert Pujols

In 2011, an anonymous donor had a statue of the then St. Louis Cardinal erected outside the Pujols 5 Grill, in St. Louis. The replica stands with his hands in the air, something Pujols said was intentionally symbolic. “That’s to remind me it’s not about me, but it’s about Jesus Christ who gave his life so we can have eternal life. It’s really easy to lose focus when you have millions of people telling you how great you are,” he said of the statue at its unveiling. A month later, he signed a ten-year, quarter-billion-dollar contract with the Los Angeles Angels. Pujols himself is gone, and the restaurant has since changed its name due to slow business, but the statue still stands, complete with a security guard.

Kumari Mayawati

During her tenure as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh—one of India’s most impoverished states—Mayawati used nearly five hundred million dollars in public funds to erect statues of Gautam Buddha, Ravidas, elephants, and herself. Nearly a dozen statues of the self-titled “Dalit Queen” (Dalit refers to a lower caste in Hindu society, formerly known as the untouchables) still stand today. Officials fear that removing them would cause uproar among Dalits who view the statues as symbols of pride. Just this Thursday, protesters beheaded a marble statue of Mayawati in Lucknow, India. The government announced that it would pay for repairs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Last year, the former California governor, Terminator, and Mr. Universe commissioned at least three bronze replicas of himself in his prime. One is on display at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum in Thal, Austria; another was unveiled earlier this year in Columbus, Ohio, for the annual Arnold Sports Festival. The third, Schwarzenegger kept for himself. Although only three commissioned statues are accounted for, there could be as many as seven. “Kindergarten Cop” alone might be reason to take the statues down, even without the budget crisis that Schwarzenegger oversaw during his time as governor of California, and the affair he admitted to once he left office.

Bobby Bowden

Since the N.C.A.A. stripped Paterno of all of his wins from 1998 to 2011, Bowden now holds the record as the winningest coach in Division I-A football. However, in 2009, the retired Florida State football coach was stripped of twelve wins of his own after some of his players were caught in an academic cheating scandal. Of Paterno’s statue, Bowden said earlier this month, “Every time somebody walks by and sees that statue, they’re not going to remember the eighty good years, they’re going to remember this thing with Sandusky.” Bowden’s own statue stands in front of Florida State University’s stadium.

Bud Selig

The statue of the Major League Baseball commissioner and former Milwaukee Brewers owner—all seven feet of it—stands in front of Miller Park. Selig gets the credit for introducing interleague play and the wildcard into the M.L.B., but he also oversaw the players’ strike that ended in the cancellation of a World Series early in his tenure, and has been heavily criticized for his failure to act to stem the rampant use of steroids in the majors.

Mel Gibson (as William Wallace)

The stone statue of Sir William Wallace that was erected in the Wallace Monument visitor center in 1997 bears a striking resemblance to Mel Gibson, who played the Scottish hero in “Braveheart.” That—and Gibson’s history of homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist slurs—may be the reason the statue was repeatedly vandalized. It was actually removed from the visitor center in 2008, but it’s now on display in its sculptor’s workshop.

Saparmurat Niyazov

Call this an honorable mention: Niyazov, the dictator who ruled Turkmenistan, beginning in 1991, actually died in 2006. But he left a lasting legacy. He changed the names of the months to honor family members; banned car radios, forced his book, “Ruhnama,” into school curriculums; and erected countless statues of himself around the country. Niyazov most famously built a rotating statue of himself standing at a humble thirty-nine feet tall atop the Neutrality Arch in Ashgabat. Its constant rotation ensured that his face would always be lit by the sun. It was dismantled in August, 2010, but restored a year later in a less prominent part of the city. The statue now stands sixty feet higher than before, but it no longer spins.

Photograph: Bothar/Wikipedia Commons.