It’s a classic post-Freeh fret from a veteran jock pen. The giveaways are phrases like “our cherished universities” and words like “tragedy” to describe the Penn State story.
Ooh, I was so naive! the writer tells us. Although I’ve been covering university football for decades, I just, I dunno, thought the higher-ups at Penn State were good, decent people… And here comes this Freeh report and JEEZ.
Well, let’s wrap this up by saying I sure hope things will get better now!
F-u-u-u-u-u-ck you.
You know, as well as any random Penn State professor knows, how systemically sick Penn State and plenty of other football factories like it are. You’ve always known. What you’re saying today is what all the hacks are saying to their jock readers:
We are poor little lambs who have lost our way.
Baa, baa, baa.
We are little black sheep who have gone astray.
Baa, baa, baa.
Okay! We bleated our little bleat!
Now…
… back to the luxury box!
The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…
No one told Stevie Wonder, however.
The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.
The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.
It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.
The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?
… as a result of a deadly athletic scandal.
Like Graham Spanier, he’ll probably be facing charges.
The morbid, bizarre, hilarious story of T. Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State University cries out for the David Lynch treatment. Only he, among American artists, can capture the twisted pathos of this death-haunted titan and his football team.
Does it? Does the University of Georgia community grow more and more impatient with its homegrown mafia?
I don’t see the slightest shadow of the faintest possibility of that. On the contrary, they seem extremely excited by these guys.
“If you find it aberrant that the athletic director and the vice president of a university are taking their orders from a football coach, welcome to the state of Pennsylvania.
… Gary Schultz and Tim Curley are facing jail time; [former Penn State president] Graham Spanier needs to follow.
… Maybe the booster money will stop coming in as they realize that this was an institution-wide decision to harm children.
And maybe, just maybe, the enormous sum of payments due to be paid out in civil lawsuits, in a state already struggling with a budget deficit, will be too deep for the university’s pockets, forcing the university into bankruptcy.”
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1242628-penn-state-university-making-life-better-now-go-away
Ah say ah say ah think we need to sit down and talk to the boys about uh thinkin.
The [University of Georgia] Bulldogs seem cursed by arrested development, discipline problems, team infractions and other self-destructive habits that induce rage and worry among fans (like me). If I had suggestions that I thought would make a real difference, as opposed to sounding like blog blather (stop recruiting high school kids who are treated like gods, convince the cops in Athens to look the other way like they do in other college towns), I’d list them.
Unlike Southern Methodist University (the last university program to be shut down):
At SMU, the violations expressly gave it a competitive advantage.
Jerry Sandusky wasn’t a crisis: a football team that had gone 5-7 the season before in 2000 was a crisis. What had happened to a 10-year-old boy wasn’t a tragedy; losing to Toledo at home on national television was a tragedy.
As revelations about Joe Paterno grow, the embarrassment of the Modern Language Association having as its director a person whose academic title is Paterno Family Professor grows.
University football in America is very rich, very corrupt, and to some degree in search of legitimacy. One lesson for universities to be drawn from the Penn State fiasco: Football is already well on its way toward becoming completely independent of whatever university used to house it. Go with that. Crossover stuff like the Paterno thing will bring you to grief.
… is the title of my latest post at Inside Higher Education.