When Paterno was in his first year as head coach at Penn State, his wife, Sue, decided that the student body wasn't caring enough about an upcoming game against Syracuse University. "It was way too quiet," she said. "No one was showing any spirit at all." So she and assistant coach George Welsh's wife, Sandra, sneaked over to the Nittany Lion statue and put a tiny bit of orange washable paint on it. But then the next morning, it was reported on the news that the statue had been painted orange and police were well aware who the perpetrators were, with time in jail on the table. "He was really mad," Sue said of Paterno. "He has always had the strongest sense of right and wrong.... If they had sent me to jail, I don't even think Joe would have fought it." Eventually, they found out that after seeing the small amount of orange paint on the statue, Syracuse students had painted the entire thing orange with oil paint and ended up serving jail time.
