I get what you are saying about the PSU football beat writers. Being wrong would pretty much end the career of anyone going down that road. David Jones of the Harrisburg Patriot News wrote a few weeks ago that he heard rumors, but could not get anywhere near enough confirmation to run with it. I would assume the same was true for the other longtime beat writers.

Even if someone wants to argue that the PSU beat writers are just fanboys that didn't want to dig into the story, it still seems hard to fathom that a 24-year-old crime beat reporter could seemingly single-handedly break such a story.

you've given up the right to claim "it's not their responsibility" from here on out, wouldn't you agree? and this was a loss of institutional control if there ever was one. unless you wish to claim they did maintain control of the situation.

this is america, we are into retributive justice. besides, it's the program being punished, as it should be. the idea that you get to hide behind the same "concern" about collateral damage that led you to aid and abet child rape when it comes to the punishment you receive is ****ing ridiculous. also, I don't think I'd claim that the fans had nothing to do with this.

if Intercollegiate Athletics, whose stewardship is the responsibility of the NCAA, is to mean anything going forward....

it's pair of pliers and a blowtorch time.

The schools did not contract to give the NCAA a general police power. It would be doing Obamacare-type legal gymnastics to read that the NCAA can sanction schools for bad behavior in general.

But, when the country decided the Feds should have a general police power they found the arguments to give them one. If the consensus is that the NCAA needs to make PSU suffer then they'll discover that it was always legal to do so.

The current BOT is sorely lacking in leadership. Nothing has changed. It's discouraging that after all this they still have yet to step up and take ownership of the situation. It's classic corporate stall stall stall. No integrity at all. It's not just about Paterno/Spanier/Schultz/Curley. The current BOT is just as lacking as those guys. The institution itself is a disgrace and an embarassment. It is NOT a world class university. It is a sham. A world class university would have owned it and acted by now. They do not. They make excuses, they equivocate, they stall. The university IS to blame - it is clear now that the four men under fire had the same ethics and operated under the same culture that exists today, that refuses to take ownership, that still acts as if they are the potential victim and not the children whose lives got ruined by a calculated decision by the university to cover its own ass at all costs. I hope they shut the ****er down. There is nothing to preserve there. Let the innocent students go somewhere with ethics, morals and integrity. For Penn State can lay claim to none of those values. Winning with honor. What a joke.

Well yeah. A fundamental problem is that the people in charge truly still believe that PSU is this super exceptional place where one bad thing happened. No you idiots, it's your ******o culture that allowed it to happen, it wasn't random bad luck like you seem to think.

Let's make this perfectly clear to the Penn State people as well. Allowing the destruction of children in lieu of putting the program at potential risk makes your program, and your former head coach, dirtier than the very dirtiest of programs that have ever existed. What they did at SMU is near-sainthood compared to the steps your "great" coach was willing to take in order to protect what he perceived as his programs best interests. Dirty and unethical to the core, on a level that is unthinkable.

A super exceptional place would not be dealing with this the way they are dealing with it today. The issues there run deep.

Arguably not as bad as Baylor, where the bball coach covered up a murder. But again, yeah.

nostra DMW predicts that the final verdict will be some kind of tax placed on PSU football where X% of the money generated goes to a victims fund. The Big Ten conference is too powerful to tolerate losing one of their rainmakers.

Also at SMU Craig James killed 5 hookers. That's pretty bad.

dammit i got slow pony-ed to the craig james jokes

so you're telling me Craig James killed 5 hookers while at SMU?

You can google it, but you are unlikely to find a link as awesome as this one on the topic.

This one is pretty ****ing awesome as well, direct interview with Craig James' head of PR.

i love mike leach

clark,

great post. a friend of mine who is a PSU alum just went on a very similar rant.

he offered their "thon" they do every year to raise money for kids (lol) as an example of their attitude:

So one person makes a FB group and 50,000+ students and hundreds of thousands of alums are labeled as holier than thou?

This is a really solid point.

consider what would be the reaction of the following schools to an identical scandal. ignore the fact that some or all of these schools never had a joe paterno type figure i guess.

harvard
yale
stanford
princeton
USC
OSU
LSU
michigan

of the above list, i feel pretty confident at least the first 4 would immediately take responsibility and probably suspend the football program (this too far of an assumption?). of course, football isnt as important to those schools (although the ivy leagues take their rivalries seriously and obv stanford is a very legit program).

but what about the last 3? i can see michigan MAYBE??? going the route of the first 3, even with how important its football program is. do we think the rest would react the same as PSU has now? (post-reveal of all the facts)

well he did attend the school, and there's more to that story than i posted, but i think he was just offering an example of his overall analysis of the place.

and anyone who has talked to PSU alums for more than 10 seconds knows he's 100% right. i mean, you cant actually be questioning that conclusion at this point, right?

he told me a bunch of dirt he doesn't want posted, but then also said this:

nailed it, obv.

USF (the Dons of San Francisco) was very proud of its basketball history. Championships in 1949, 55, 56. They won the WCC every year 1977-1981. They started 27-0 in 1977.

In 1982 the star player plead guilty to sexual assault (sentenced to probation??) and took money from boosters for a no-show job. The administration didn't wait to see what the NCAA would do. They dropped basketball entirely.

USF is neither big nor academically prestigious. You don't expect research breakthroughs or Nobel Prizes to come from USF. Basketball was their main claim to fame. They could have kept it up. Certainly the delusional alumni would have liked that. Dropping basketball entirely was like hitting the reset button. It sent a clear message that they were an academic institution with sports on the side, not a basketball factory.

The team came back after 3 years with no basketball. They've been an average school in a mid major conference for the last 25 years. Mission Accomplished.

http://www.usfca.edu/templates/usf_m...tid=2147483673

Say what you want about PSU but please do not try to act like you have a single iota of an idea as to how any other institution would react to something similar. You are way out on a limb here. The assertion that you have any ****ing idea is laughable. Horrible post.

Yes this was a problem of big state school's in isolated an isolated community of midwestern cultists. That could never happen at an elite private school in New York City because they are run by intellectuals with great moral sensibilities. Not here, not now, never.

He's guessing. But what we don't have to guess about is that it's impossible for any of them to handle it any worse than Penn State did, and continues to do.

well, you would be an expert on horrible posts, so perhaps ill just have to concede the point, eh?

(also clark said it for me)

It would never happen here = I've never faced it before.

I unfortunately agree 100% percent with the statement about how PSU handled the situation. However, to try to say with certainty how any institution with tens of millions of dollars on the line will react to scandal is so obviously off the reservation.