It’s a week now since Penn State became a different school than it used to be; maybe in the next week, or, more likely, months, we’ll find that it’s becoming a better one. Saturday there’s a football game, against Nebraska, without Joe Paterno, who was fired for his failures in the Jerry Sandusky case. Sandusky, Paterno’s former defensive coordinator, is facing forty charges of sexually abusing and, in some of the cases, raping eight children. (He denies the charges.) The essential reading is the grand jury’s findings. It’s an awful story, full of moral mysteries; I wrote about it yesterday, and the question that concerned me most then was how this all looked through the eyes of those children. That’s the one that matters. But there are dozens of others: the role of the governor; the power of the campus police; what the Penn State students carrying signs in support of Paterno were thinking; why, when one of them stood up to the crowd and talked about the obligations of leadership—video, above, via Andrew Sullivan—another tried to discredit him on the grounds that he was wearing a Tony Dorsett jersey (Dorsett, a native of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, went to Pitt); what on earth was going on at the Second Mile Foundation; what all this has to do with football. But just to get started, here are four personnel questions to take into the weekend:

Why did Sandusky leave his job in 1999?

There isn’t a good answer for Paterno and Penn State to this one—just variations on the theme of delinquency. In 1998, there had been a campus police investigation: it began with a mother noticing that her son had returned from an activity with Sandusky with his hair wet; proceeded to officers listening in on a phone call in which Sandusky admitted to showering with the boy, and all but confessed to much worse; and ended, inexplicably, maddeningly, with a detective advising him that showering with children wasn’t such a good move. (A D.A. declined to press charges; he later went missing, something that has inspired a whole sub-genre of questions.) Was Sandusky’s departure, a year later, completely unconnected? (Mark Madden, a columnist for the Beaver County Times, looked at that timeline in a piece last April that should have kept the indictment from catching anyone at Penn State by surprise.) If it wasn’t, why not? If it was, does that mean that university officials just decided to get a pedophile off of its staff, without worrying about any child whose parents weren’t paying tuition to Penn State? As SI.com points out, until a few days ago Sandusky “was listed on the school’s website as ‘assistant professor emeritus of physical education.’” He might not have been a Penn State coach, but the university still provided him with the reputation and resources—game tickets, introductions—that he bartered for access to vulnerable children. His retirement package included keys to the locker room showers. What did the university think he would do with them?

Why did Paterno keep his job in 2004?

Two years after Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw Sandusky raping a ten-year-old in the shower—and Paterno told Tim Curley, the athletic director, who had some sort of conversation with Graham Spanier, Penn State’s president—and nothing was done, a number of those characters reassembled for another drama. Curley and Spanier wanted Paterno to leave; the football team had just had a 4-7 season. Paterno pushed back, and won. Causally, those two scenes may be entirely unconnected. They’re no indication now that either side evoked the earlier events, or that any of the officials was even a fraction as haunted by them as they should have been. Paterno clearly had a lot of different kinds of leverage. But one would like to know more about how the Sandusky story intersected with a relationship that seems to have been marked by complicity and compromise.

At the very least, in 2004 Paterno showed that, at Penn State, he had more power than the university president. He just seems to have used it to protect himself, rather than Sandusky’s alleged victims.

Or could Paterno be as oblivious as his supporters claim? If so, he was not the coach they also like to believe he was. Sandusky worked for him for almost thirty years. Paterno’s whole job was assessing weaknesses and strengths. That wasn’t confined to the football field: there was recruiting, there was the bureaucratic infighting that allowed him to hold on to a job for half a century. What did he think Sandusky’s were?

What about Mike McQueary?

I don’t mean the moral question—namely, how a twenty-eight-year-old former quarterback, well over six feet tall, whose ambition it is to coach students, happens upon a small child being raped and doesn’t, that minute, pull him away from his attacker—though books could be written about that one. There’s also a practical question. How did McQueary’s decision to call Paterno, rather than 911, and his subsequent quiet, affect his career at Penn State? A year after the incident, when silence set in, he was promoted. He became the one on the sidelines Paterno spoke to and through. He also helped with recruiting. He has now, finally, been put on administrative leave, after the university first said that he’d only be kept out of sight on Saturday—for his own protection.

Who finally exposed Sandusky?

This is the only one I have an answer for. It wasn’t any of the Penn State officials, or the coaches or foundation board members or principals who dealt closely with Sandusky. It was Victim 1—a kid. (USA Today has a good story on how he came forward.) The breakthrough came when, as his mother told “Good Morning America,” he asked about how to look for a list of “sex weirdos” online. “I asked him who he was looking up; he wanted to see if Jerry was on there.” There is more than one remarkable thing there. First is the boy’s bravery—that is first and foremost. Another is that a child in a situation that was both crushing and lonely thought that connecting with a database might help—that it might tell him about children like him. He sensed that what had happened to him was bad enough to be written down somewhere. Abusers persuade their victims that they are isolated, that, even if they tell, no one will believe them or care, that they are, in the fullest sense, on their own. But that boy in Pennsylvania still had enough of himself intact to believe that he was not alone. One can only be grateful for that.