Jackson Free Press

Sports have taken a serious turn the past couple of weeks. Games on the field have taken a back seat to the scandal at Penn State. The allegations against former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky are tough to read. If found guilty, he should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Although Penn State and Sandusky have been in the news, let me see a show of hands from those who heard about the sexual-abuse scandal in the Olympic USA Swimming team last year. Did you hear about Andy King who pleaded no-contest to 20 charges of molestation over 30 years as a San Jose, Calif.-area swim coach? King was sentenced to a 40-year prison term.

The swimming scandal was much like the one at Penn State. Officials failed to report a coaches' inappropriate contact with children. Wanting their children to succeed, even parents ignored warning signs, an ESPN report found.

Much like the Catholic priest scandal, USA Swimming moved coaches around the country to avoid criminal charges and still allowed them to coach, which led to more victims. Over 10 years, USA Swimming banned 36 coaches for life for sexual abuse.

Abuse on the swim team produced just a blip on the radar, but the Penn State scandal produced a large amount of moral outrage. Is one case is worse than the other?

Any case of abuse is horrible, no matter how large or small it is. If the Penn State scandal was at Southwestern Podunk State, would we have even heard about it? I wonder.

So you missed the swimming scandal but surely you heard about the youth hockey scandal. NHL star Theo Fleury brought sexual abuse in youth hockey to light in October 2009. Fleury's abuse happened in Canada so it is understandable if you missed it. The Canadian government pardoned the abuser in the Fluery case, Graham James, in 2007.

OK. You missed the swimming and hockey scandals. But last week, you had to have heard that a former Olympic gymnastics coach was accused of sexual abuse in the 1980s, or two former ball boys for the Syracuse men's basketball team said assistant coach Bernie Fine abused them in the 1980s.

Mainstream media do a terrible job of covering abuse in sports. If Joe Paterno weren't involved, you never would have heard about Penn State.

If the media are going to show moral outrage for one abuse scandal, then it needs to show the same outrage for the others, exposing this nasty trend. Instead, it feels like they were swept under the rug.

Follow Bryan Flynn at http://www.jfpsports.com, Facebook and @jfpsports.