NBC sportscaster Bob Costas said, "What Freeh did was not only gather facts but he reached a conclusion which is at least debatable from those facts and then he assigned a motivation, not only to Curley and Schultz and Spanier, but he specifically assigned a very dark motivation to Joe Paterno, which seems like it might be quite a leap. ... A reasonable person will conclude that there is some doubt here and that the other side of the story deserves to be heard." Similarly Todd Blackledge, ESPN college football analyst and former Penn State quarterback, noted on the media coverage, "it felt like the media felt at liberty to just connect the all those dots, whether they had facts. Based on whatever information they had, they were going to connect the dots and tell a story. And it had tremendous momentum. Because of the serious and horrendous nature of the allegations against Jerry, that narrative went pretty much unopposed."