Inhistoric

Notes on Super Bowl XLVI

2012-02-07T17:55:56Z

I have to admit, it feels weird writing about Super Bowl XLVI because it feels like I've already done it. Dunno about the rest of you, but I was getting a serious case of deja vu throughout game; it was getting downright spooky just how similar this game was to the Super Bowl from four years ago, and it wasn't just because the teams were the same, and they were wearing the same uniforms, and they were playing in a dome like before, or that the Patriots were favored again. Both games were duller than dishwater for the first three quarters; both games had significantly less scoring than people anticipated; both games were defined by a key injury to a New England Patriot; both games ended with Eli Manning going on a game-winning drive, helped by a miracle catch by one of his receivers; in both games, the Giant who came with away with the game-winning score was someone who had been completely invisible to that point.

The similarities were so striking that when it got to Tom Brady's final possession, and the Pats were at fourth-and-16 deep in their own territory, I seriously began to question whether I was watching an exact replicate of Super Bowl XLII. However, Brady at least completed a pass to Deion Branch to extend the game, so it wasn't entirely the same.

Anywho, let's get to the records. The convenient thing -- for me anyway -- is that because there haven't even been 50 Super Bowls, it's virtually impossible for there to not be a dozen records set in every single Super Bowl. It's not like with baseball, where over a hundred years of seven-game series have made it rare for there to be a record-setting anything -- not that this latest World Series wasn't historical. I guess that was a bad example. Anyway…

Tom Coughlin, at age 65, is now the oldest Super Bowl winning coach in history. It's funny how reactionary our praise is in sports. When Tom Coughlin took over as the Giants' coach, there wasn't a single writer who stood up and wrote, "Wow, look at him coach. This is guy is going to be a Hall of Famer." It's only after he's won two rings that people are praising him as an all-time great, but the funny aspect with Coughlin is that the Giants have been itching to can him for years. Had the Giants lost their season-finale to the Cowboys, Coughlin might be out of a job right now. He'd be the exact same coach that is today, but no one would be praising him as amazing.

Now that Tom Brady has lost two Super Bowls, what does that make of him historically? I think as sports fans, we've been utterly spoiled in every aspect by Michael Jordan. Jordan had a perfect, spotless, storybook career, and he ruined what it means to be great for every other player. In truth, even the greatest of all time face defeat constantly. John Elway might be the best quarterback ever, and he lost three times in the Super Bowl in games that were never even close; Brady on the other hand has won three of his five Super Bowl appearances, and his two losses were at least competitive. In a way, Brady is a lot like Kobe Bryant: both are one of the all-time greats of their sport, both have lost twice in the championship, both are looking for one more championship to put them at an elite historical plateau -- Kobe would have as many rings as Jordan, and Brady would have as many rings as Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw.

At one point, Tom Brady completed 16 consecutive passes, setting a new Super Bowl record. In the end, key drops from Wes Welker and Branch, not to mention the ineffectiveness of Rob Gronkowski, will deflect much of the blame away from Brady. By no means will he be looked at as the reason they lost.

Super Bowl XLVI was the most watched television event EVER. 111.3 million people tuned in, which was slightly more than the 111 million people who watched last year's game between the Packers and the Steelers. And how did NBC capitalize on their sudden ratings boom? By unveiling a horribly-derivative American Idol rip-off that has less chance of becoming a hit show than Newt Gingrich does of putting a colony on the moon. There's nothing that'll get me to flip the channel faster than fake-outrage from B-grade judges who none of us care about. Also, the chairs are way too big.

And speaking of flipping, how about that half-time show? It was the most-watched halftime show in history, and guest singer M.I.A. took advantage of the spotlight by giving the audience a big middle finger. Lovely. Here's where I'm confused. I realize that we all want the game live and everything, but why can't the halftime show have like a five second delay? Would it really be that big of a deal? Most of us just complain about the half-time show as a joke anyway -- why does it have to be a live joke, especially if there's the possibility of something like that happening? Also, if the NFL is so concerned about performers doing controversial stuff on live TV, why was M.I.A. allowed to go on stage anyway? Why is there a loophole where the main performer can't be young or potentially risque, but the side performers can dress as half-naked 300 rejects?

So it looks like Braun will keep his MVP. Huh.

2012-02-04T04:33:19Z

It's hard to rationalize why Ryan Braun should be allowed to keep the National League MVP trophy. Braun was found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs, an act that he has since denied, but one that will nonetheless cost him $1.87 million of his $6 million salary and keep him out of work for 50 games. But... he's somehow allowed to keep the MVP. Guffaw??? This would be like if you counted cards at a casino, won a poker tournament that netted you a Coupe de Ville, got busted, went to jail, and had to pay a fine... but you still got to keep the Coupe de Ville. Kinda seems like an oversight, huh?

And what's especially weird is that this has become common for Major League Baseball, a league that used to be millitant in its preservation of statistical canonology. It was baseball, after all, that put an asterisk on Roger Maris' record-breaking 61-home run season. It was baseball that lowered the mound when they thought the pitcher was getting too much of an advantage, baseball that briefly banned Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle for working at a casino and having even a tangential connection to gambling, and it was baseball that initiated a rule to keep ineligible players like Pete Rose off the Hall of Fame ballot and to keep the Hall as pure as possible.

Baseball was so steadfast in its ideology that when it was discovered that one of Ty Cobb's box scores had erroneously been counted twice, and that his hit total should have been reduced from 4,191 to 4,189, baseball simply ignored it because changing one stat would in a sense indict them all. To this day, the number of hits MLB.com says Ty Cobb has is two more than what Baseball Reference says he has, a contradiction that is absurd. Some might call this stubbornness or even close-mindedness, but to the people running Major League Baseball, the preservation of statistics was so sacrosanct that to disrupt them even rightfully wasn't even a consideration.

Now, things have changed. Baseball seems content to let the steroid-users trample the records they had worked so hard to institutionalize. In a way, it seems like baseball doesn't know how to a handle a cheating epidemic of such scale and popularity, nor do they have much of a reference point to help them out. The founding baseball fathers did a great job establishing the rules of the game a hundred years ago, but even they couldn't have imagined the day where a butt-cheek-inserted syringe could transform a middling player into a perennial All-Star. The sport appears so overwhelmed by the rampant cheating, and so unclear on what to do with the stats, that not a thing has been done to challenge the validity of the steroid era's biggest offenders, from Barry Bonds to Sammy Sosa to Mark McGwire. All the home run records still stand. All the MVP's still stand. All the players found to have used illegal substances are still eligible for the Hall of Fame. And there isn't a single veto in sight.

It's debatable whether or not baseball should retroactively displace the numbers of the steroids era with an asterisk or by putting them in their own category, or "wing" if you will. With Braun though, there's all the reason in the world to claim that his MVP is invalid, and all the reason in the world for his prize to be revoked, asterisked, or put up for a new vote altogether. If he's able to walk away with the trophy, it lends little assurance to me that the steroids era really is over. After all, Ryan Braun played so well last year that he got a $104 million extension. If a 50-game suspension and a loss of $1.87 million allowed him to earn a nine-figure contract AND keep the MVP award, then unfortunately, the end still justifies the mean. And if baseball really wants to eliminate cheating, that's the part they're going to have to work on.

Why It Isn't Wrong To Attack The Recently-Departed JoePa

2012-01-29T15:28:51Z

If there's one generalization that I've found applies to everyone in life, it's that no one truly knows how to deal with death. There really is no right way to address it, and a lot of times, people will only focus on the positive aspects of a person's life as a sort of memorial. On the one hand, this speaks to the kindness of human nature, that we can look beyond the faults and issues of a person and focus on what made others like them. It's a well-intentioned way to look a person posthumously, but often it's often a dangerously short-sighted tactic as well. Often, the media will whitewash any controversial aspects of a person's life, probably because they don't want to seem insensitive to the dead or because they don't want to insult the next of kin. When Michael Jackson and Jerry Falwell died and were treated like flawless, exceptional human beings, it rang hollow. Everyone has faults, and when those faults are as obvious as child molestation allegations (in Jackson's case) or blaming 9/11 on women and gay people (in Falwell's case), not mentioning their flaws is not only insensitive in how biased it is, it's unethical.

Which is how I felt over the swooning that took place when Joe Paterno died. If his former players and if the current Penn State students want to proselytize what a great man he was, they have to at least acknowledge why someone so otherwise beloved and respected had to be fired in disgrace. To just circle around the same anecdotes of leadership and courage without mentioning that his lack of principle allowed dozens of children to get raped, it's just not an accurate portrayal. He isn't Santa Claus. He is a three-dimensional, flawed human being. And yet when I watched the coverage of his funeral procession on ESPN the other day, I found myself on the verge of drop-kicking my television. Not once was the Jerry Sandusky fiasco mentioned. Not once, in a segment that featured tears and appraisals and compliments of him, was there even an inference of the scandal that got him fired. And in what was a recap of the man's life, it needed to be there. It needed to be shown that this too was a part of the man, myth and legend; to just bypass it entirely was disgraceful.

Now look, I'm not going to pretend that Paterno didn't do a lot of good in his previous fifty years at Penn State -- because that'd be wrong too. He did a lot of good things for the university. He helped a lot of inner-city kids, he preached ethics, he showed a compassion and enthusiasm that propelled the school from a Podunk nothing to a college football powerhouse in the time he was there. The school today wouldn't be nearly as prominent as it is now without him, and that's partly because he contributed millions of dollars to the campus over the years. These things are by no means meaningless.... BUT...

Anyone who uses that as an excuse to overlook his transgressions is delusional. To me, what Paterno did on the football field was a trifle. It was his job, and people loved him primarily because he was good at it. But no one in their wildest dreams has the right to claim that what he did as the football coach should supersede the terrible things he looked the other way on. If Joe Paterno really was a great man, what kind of standards are we using to overlook something so horrendous? How can he be a great person when all his supporters won't even discuss his culpability in the scandal? How is that he has something so awful on his resume that can't possibly hold up to scrutiny? How can he be great, but be so wrong so often with only the pithiest traces of repentance?

These questions need to be asked, because quite frankly, what Paterno did or didn't do with Sandusky is a thousand times more significant than what he did on the football field, and because I feel that he never even owned up to his transgressions, yes, I think that does trump everything he did in the previous fifty years. Any sort of character he showed as a man of the people was, to me, ultimately overridden by the fact that he showed more deference to football than to little kids, and that he possibly even lied about his knowledge of it in his final days. The way Paterno handled Jerry Sandusky can't be look at as an aberration, not when it went on for so long -- especially when it's factored in that what Paterno claimed he knew in a grand jury testimony and what he told Sally Jenkins he knew a few weeks prior to his death are disturbingly inconsistent. I would go as far as to say that it's almost impossible to look at both statements he made and not conclude that in at least one instance, the man was lying.

The man people are now once again cherishing as though the scandal never happened.

"Jerry Sandusky looks terrific," M.G. Missanelli wrote in the 2007 book: The Perfect Season: How Penn State Came to Stop a Hurricane and Win a National Football Championship. "He's still tall, sinewy, and vascular, even if the hair is a little grayer and thinner -- a man in full in the flowing twilight of his life. At one time ambition burned at him inside to become a head football coach somewhere ... In 1998, Sandusky traded in his hundred yards for The Second Mile permanently. He resigned as PSU's defensive coordinator that spring, stunning Nittany Lions fans who had come to rely on his impenetrable defenses and his notable contributions to Penn State's becoming nationally known as Linebacker U. At the time, there were whispers that Sandusky and Paterno, two strong-willed men who clashed often over the years, could no longer coexist. Stories were rampant that Paterno had given a vacuous promise to Sandusky that he'd be the next Penn State coach. As far back as 1987, pregame stories of the Fiesta Bowl had broached the subject. By 1998 speculation was that Sandusky was simply tired of waiting for the old man to go.

"Sandusky says that today he doesn't socialize with Paterno, but that's no big deal, he says, since the two men aren't the socializing type anyway. The last time he saw Joe, he happened to be driving on campus, looking for a parking space near the football offices en route to a workout. As he made a turn, he nearly bumped into a man walking through the lot. It was Paterno. He rolled down the window. They had a conversation. They vowed to get together soon. A vapid promise men often make to other men they have no plans to visit any time soon. That's just the way things work sometimes."

No aspect of the Jerry Sandusky scandal has been more scrutinized than Joe Paterno's relationship with him, and how much he really knew about his assistant coach's private life. No man was tethered longer to Paterno's side than Sandusky, who worked on the Penn State sideline as an assistant in some capacity for over 30 years. But in 1999, Sandusky suddenly retired, claiming that he wanted to dedicate himself full-time to his Second Mile Charity. At the time, many were baffled why someone so determined to become a head coach would not only abandon his post at Penn State, but give up coaching altogether.

Most believed that he had truly found his calling with The Second Mile program, which Sandusky had created in 1977 under the guise of helping needy children. However, the revelation that in 1998, Jerry Sandusky was found to have inappropriately touched an 11-year-old boy -- referred to as Victim 6 in the recent grand jury report -- in a Penn State shower raises questions as to how much Paterno knew at the time. A six-week police report was conducted, and although Sandusky was caught saying, "I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness from you. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead," to the boy's mother in a sting, the case was eventually dropped on the grounds that there wasn't enough evidence.

The police report was never made public until the recent grand jury report on Sandusky in 2011, and to suggest that Paterno had any knowledge of Sandusky's actions to this point would be pure speculation. However, the fact that Sandusky's sudden sabbatical from football coincided with a campus police investigation on whether or not he had molested a child should raise some eyebrows, not to mention that it seems highly dubious that word of Sandusky's incident would have never reached the ears of Joe Paterno -- the most important figure at Penn State -- while somehow managing to reach the ears of Gary Schultz, the Vice President of business and finance at Penn State.

But one thing is clear: Joe Paterno had to have known by 2002 what kind of a man Sandusky was. Even if he was completely oblivious to it all, even if he missed all the signs, even if he never heard a single word or rumor or allegation from anyone, it's indisputable that in 2002 at the very latest, Paterno learned that Sandusky wasn't the sort of man who should be around kids on a regular basis. It was in that year that a visibly-shaken Mike McQueary went into his office and told him that he had seen Sandusky -- who still had full visitation rights at the school -- anally-raping a child. According to Joe Paterno's testimony in 2011, he then told Tim Curley, the school's athletic director, that "the grad assistant [McQueary] had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy."

What happened then is the most shameful part of the whole ordeal. Despite knowledge of what had happened, neither Paterno nor McQueary nor Schultz nor Curley nor school president Graham Spanier ever called the police, or went to the media, or did anything in their power to prevent Sandusky from molesting another child. They never even informed his associates at The Second Mile, or even banned him from the premises. The only action the school took against Sandusky -- who then wasn't even an active employee at the school -- was to ban him from bringing children onto the campus, a penalty that wasn't even enforced. Sandusky held football camps at the Penn State campus in Erie, Pennsylvania all the way up to 2008, and in 2007, he was even plucked to be the commencement speaker at Penn State's College of Health and Human Development.

Yes, Joe Paterno went to his superiors. Legally he did nothing wrong. But as a man with the responsibility of protecting innocent children, JoePa failed. For nine years he sat on that information. With all his power and influence, Paterno could have had Sandusky in jail with little more than a flick of his wrists. He could've informed the media. He could've done something, anything, to make sure that Sandusky wasn't allowed to be near a child again. Instead, he did nothing. Like so many others at Penn State, for no explicable reason, he tolerated a pedophile in the school's name being a free man, attending school functions, even showing up on main campus now and then again. When I read that Paterno would even engage in small talk with Sandusky at the school parking lot, it's impossible for me to harbor any respect for the man. It's one thing to be fooled and left unaware of what someone near you is doing; it's something else entirely to know what that person had done, and to do nothing about it. For Paterno to run into Sandusky and not want to punch him, or call security, or walk away in disgust, let alone not sprinting to the first police officer in sight to get him removed immediately, is a revolting lack of dignity. He had nine years to grow a spine. But he did nothing.

There was a cover-up at Penn State, one so far reaching that even though Sandusky's indiscretion in 2002 was known about from the head of the athletic program to the president of the university, nothing happened to him. He was protected, and given Paterno's brazen unwillingness to ever speak up about him, given Sandusky's close affiliation to him and the football program over the years, and given a 2011 Wall Street Journal article where the school's standards and conduct officer complained in a 2005 email that Paterno wanted his football players to be given preferential treatment over regular students, and it's hard to see why Paterno wouldn't have been involved as well -- nor does he deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Over the last decade, Greg Mortenson has become one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the world. Mortenson wrote books such as Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools where the mountain climber preached the necessity of educating women, while claiming that his charity organization -- the Central Asia Institute -- had overseen the construction of hundreds of schools in impoverished nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. His books were wildly successful, enough so that when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, he donated $100,000 of his prize money to Mortenson's foundation.

There was just one problem. Mortenson was fraud, or at least mostly a fraud.

It turned out that he really had built a lot of schools overseas. He really had helped thousands of young kids get educated, especially young girls. However, significant portions of his claims were greatly exaggerated, if not completely fabricated. Some of the schools he claimed to have built were being used as warehouses; some didn't exist at all. A 60 Minutes investigation even discovered that one of the most harrowing tales in his books, that he had been kidnapped by members of the Taliban, had been completely manufactured. The men Mortenson described as terrorists were really just businessmen.

Now, Mortenson has very little credibility. There's no question that if asked to classify him, people would have no trouble describing him as a liar, a manipulator, a swindler, and someone who is not to be trusted. Again, a fraud. And yet, if I asked for the same Q-rating of Joe Paterno, there's also no question that I'd get a decidedly different reaction. Which is weird. After all, for all the good things Paterno may have done in his life, he never did anything as good as what Mortenson did; JoePa never flew to war-torn Afghanistan under the threat of terrorism and had schools built for destitute children. And at the same time, as greasy as Mortenson might have been, as despicable as he was to embellish tales of charity for the sake of increasing his book sales, he never did anything as reprehensible as what Paterno did. Compared to looking the other way on a child molester, making up stories isn't so bad.

So why is there such a difference in reaction? How come there's very little contention over the wrong-doing of someone like Mortenson, whereas with Paterno, there are still people praising him like he's the white Mahatma Ganghi? Even before he died, there was a notable hesitance to condemn this man who, again, was willing to have pleasant conversations with a child molester in a school parking lot. And now that he's dead, he's once again being treated like a god, as though his death somehow makes up for all the lives he ruined when he didn't go to the police or show the slightest bit of moral righteousness.

The difference has puzzled me these last few days, and even though the reason is actually quite transparent, that doesn't make it any less confusing. If there's any generalization why Jerry Sandusky was allowed to do what he did for as long as he did, it's that football was valued to such a ridiculous extent at Penn State that when forced to make a critical humans right issue, everyone who could have made a difference bowed to the almighty pigskin and did nothing. Whether it was Paterno, or Schultz, or Curley, or McQueary or Spanier, not one of them spoke up about the shower incident. Not one of them had the courage or decency to value a kid's safety over the potential backlash of the football program, so they went on pretending that nothing ever happened.

At first, I thought that this gross lack of perspective was attributable only to Penn State, where the student body was so upset over Paterno's firing that they formed a vigil around his house the night he was fired. But the more I watched the reaction to his death, and the more I watched analysts on ESPN pretending that the whole Sandusky-thing never happened, the more I realized that the issue at hand -- the preferential treatment of sports over everything -- was endemic even to the media.

In a way it makes sense. To most of us, sports are like wrestling. We see it as a distraction to everyday life, and the athletes we follow are built up in black-or-white, hate-'em or love-'em proportions, so that someone like Eli Manning can't just be a guy who plays football for a living -- he has to be an annoying brat too. Jay Cutler? A whiny bitch. Ron Artest? A lunatic. Armando Gallaraga? The classiest man alive. John Rocker? A monster. There's very little nuance or gray area, but the athletes we love or hate are loved and hated in a very subjective, very one-sided way, and any attempt to derail these opinions are usually disregarded.

Which is what makes the treatment of Joe Paterno so ridiculous. It's bad enough that pundits like Dick Vital can go on TV and talk about what a great man Paterno was while admitting that he never actually met him (!), but the level to which Paterno has been portrayed is downright laughable, even without considering the Sandusky ordeal. The man Penn State students are crying over literally doesn't exist. In reality, Paterno was a pleasant guy with an amazing football record who fucked up royally on some very important issues. But the way people are referring to him, you'd think he parted the Red Sea, discovered America and invented the G-Spot. It'd be funny to watch these grown men gush about his football wins like they were the most important things in the universe if it wasn't so goddamn sad. Essentially, they're worshiping an imaginary figure, as though he had been lifted right out of a Greg Mortenson book. The Paterno they mourn was a perfect coach, a perfect gentleman, a man with no flaws or shortcomings who should have never been fired and who was ultimately betrayed by his own university. They don't mention what Paterno didn't do with Sandusky because they want to keep the dream alive -- the dream that he really was some larger-than-life, inhumanly great man of the people.

Unfortunately, this is the level of reasoning that takes place when the men at the center of it all are treated like superheroes. The sad truth is that on Joe Paterno's watch, the worst human rights scandal in the history of college sports took place, and for at least nine years, Paterno had knowledge of prior incidents and did nothing. It's immensely easy to write what many have been writing, that Joe Paterno's legacy as a football coach shouldn't be completely smothered by the Sandusky fiasco. They both need to be mentioned, both the good parts and the bad parts. But not even fifty years of service can marginalize the degree to which he failed in the final years of his life.

Sandusky wasn't some Sam Hurd-type walk-on with barely any connection to the program -- for 32 years, he was an assistant under Paterno, and he used his status as the head of "Linebacker U" to create The Second Mile, which enabled him to molest as many kids as possible. Sandusky is facing over 50 counts of child molestation, crimes that were made possible because of his status at Penn State, and some which were specifically able to take place because Paterno did nothing to stop it after the 2002 shower incident. This wasn't a one-time mistake; this was a systematic, conscious decision over a period of a decade to put football above everything. Honestly, I don't care what JoePa did for the school, or that he did it for fifty years -- what he didn't do to help a dozen or fifty or a hundred kids is a million times more important, and I defy anyone to say differently.

In the three months between the scandal becoming national news and Paterno's death, I kept waiting for Joe Paterno to express not just a modicum of remorse, but an actual admission of shame. I kept waiting for Paterno to break down and throw himself at the mercy of the victims' mothers, to express devastation that he not only could have done more, but should've done more and was wrong for not doing otherwise. I kept waiting for the honor, the pride, the morals that had been attributed to him for so many years to show themselves, for him to castigate the people in charge of Penn State for their part in tolerating Sandusky, for him to disassociate himself from the Schultz's and Curley's and Spanier's who had let it happen, and for him to declare making Jerry Sandusky his assistant a mistake that haunted him to his core.

Instead, the Paterno that presented himself in his final months was a saccharine up-beat one who only wanted to discuss football, who fought to keep his job, who wanted to have a press conference where only Penn State's upcoming football game would be discussed, and who expressed disappointment when that conference was ultimately canceled. He lead the students around his house in a cheer after he was fired, and in his first and only interview between then and his death, he disavowed what he said to the grand jury, claiming that McQueary "didn't want to get specific. And to be frank with you I don't know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man."

As Drew Magary of Deadspin so eloquently wrote after reading the interview: "Joe Paterno is full of shit."

And yet, the people who defended Paterno looked at his behavior in his final days as further proof of his splendor. What I found an infuriating lack of contrition, they found commendable, even honorable. Joe Posnanski, who's in the middle of writing a book about Paterno, wrote as much in a recent article, stating that Paterno spent his final days in peace and not bitter and not full of regrets. He even said he asked the following of Paterno, a question so horrifyingly infested with bias that it deserves to follow Posnanski to his grave: "I asked Paterno at one point in that last month if he hoped that people would come to see and measure his full life rather than a single, hazy event involving an alleged child molester."

What an insultingly dismissive, offensive, inconsiderate way to ask that question. Posnanski is an excellent writer, but he too is one of the many Paterno supporters living in a fantasy world where JoePa is the personification of class, and where a few smiles and grins mean not only that he's a kind old man, but that he's one of the greatest human beings ever put on the planet. It's tremendously disappointing to read something so amateurishly written, where Paterno's culpability in Sandusky's actions is reduced to "a single, hazy event," as though that excuses everything.

The bottom line is that there are two types of people in this world: there are the people who, when informed that one of their co-workers has been seen sexually fondling a young boy, do everything in their power to put the perpetrator in jail. And there are the people who do nothing, who go on having conversations in the parking lot with the perpetrator and don't have trouble sleeping at night, wondering if they had really done enough. If Paterno really was such an amazing person, he would have made the first choice in a heartbeart. But he didn't, and for Posnanski to apologetically cover his child-molester-friendly actions is pathetic. It honestly makes me lose all credibility for Posnanski, who should be embarrassed to have even suggested that Paterno's career on the gridiron should seriously get mentioned over the dozens of children that got raped when he didn't do a thing to stop it... LET ALONE that Posnanski softballed it to Paterno without the slightest intention of being an independent journalist hellbent on getting to the bottom of anything. No doubt, when Posnanski does get around to writing his biography on Paterno, it'll be a fluffy, Greg Mortenson-esque fairy tale of a mythical Joe Paterno, a man who somehow managed to be great despite failing as a human being at the absolute critical moment when he needed to do the right thing.

Of course, if even Posnanski can be this delusional, it's no wonder the whole media is fawning over Paterno. To be sure, the way Paterno's death has been treated by the mainstream sports media has been downright abysmal -- not because they're mourning the loss of an incredibly-beloved man, but because they're doing it in a light that paints Paterno as one-dimensional cartoon character. It's as if all those complaints about him went out the window the moment he died; when we needed a tough nose-to-the-grindstone media that would challenge Paterno on his shortcomings, we got Sally Jenkins writing a follow-up-question-less love letter of an interview, a sycophantic profile by Joe Posnanski, and a myriad of analysts like Dick Vital who showed all the partisanship of a 13-year-old schoolgirl meeting Justin Bieber for the first time. Make no mistake, our media failed BIG TIME.

Child molestation is the worst crime anyone on this planet can commit. It is not to be tolerated, it is not to be excused, and neither is the covering up such crimes, or as Joe Posnanski would delicately describe it: "hazy events with an alleged child molester." Joe Paterno was a good man who spent the majority of his life doing good things, and for whatever the hell it's worth, he won a lot of football games. But not even his death has to right to obscure the obvious, pernicious events that took place during his tenure, or that he did very little to prevent it and made little attempt to explain it. Joe Paterno needed to be chastised. He needed to be castigated. Someone needed to point out that much like Greg Mortenson, the vast majority of his charity work was self-motivated, and the moment he was required to help someone in a spot that wouldn't help the football team, he failed, and it was a consistent, not-at-all-isolated nine-year failure. Instead, as a final send-off, the media fell back into old habits, and Paterno once again become Flawless Man -- a depiction that holds all the intellectual weight of the child-adult relationship in Lolita.

But don't take my word for it. Go out and buy Joe Posnanski's book about Paterno, which -- if there's any justice in the world -- will be located in the fiction section of your nearest bookstore. It may not contain many hard-hitting questions, or chapters about how disappointed he was in Paterno, or even a manifesto about how the inability to protect children is indeed more significant than any on-the-field successes in game where fratboys throw a pigskin around for sixty minutes. But in a way, that's perfect. What better to epitomize the gross characterization of Paterno than with a 200-page puff piece from the most esteemed sports writer in the nation, who will capture the image of Paterno in such childlike wonder, you'll swear it's as if he's an innocent little kid, happy to go on the with the rest of his life, no doubt appreciating that he had never been slowed by "a single hazy event" that could have robbed him of his imagination.

Dwight Howard breaks a tremendously-belated franchise record

2012-01-25T18:24:03Z

The Orlando Magic are a very interesting franchise. They're located in sunny Orlando, Florida, a city that at first glance would appear to be a haven for potential NBA free-agents. And yet they have a miserable history of not only attracting players, but keeping the few players they manage to bring in. The Orlando Magic have the bizarre distinction of being a prime destination that no one ever goes to. It's almost inexplicable.

For instance, last night, Dwight Howard scored 14 points and became the Orlando Magic's all-time leading scorer, passing Nick Anderson, who held the previous mark with 10,650 points. Considering that the Magic have been around for nearly 23 seasons, it's hard to accept that Nick Anderson -- who was just a role player on the great Magic teams in the 90's that had Penny and Shaq -- had held this mark for this long.

But it really was a record of attrition. Anderson held it because he is not only the only Magic player to spend ten consecutive years with the franchise, he is the only player period to last ten years with the franchise. It isn't just that Orlando has been unable to attract many big-name players (Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill and Rashard Lewis barely qualify as exceptions). It's that they've been categorically incapable of re-signing the good players they manage to get. They lost Shaq after four years, they traded Penny, they traded McGrady, they lost Hill, they dealt Steve Francis, and it's pretty damn clear that they're about to lose Howard too.

Their lack of success in retaining players is staggering. Assuming they lose Howard, not only will they have lost every single superstar they ever had no longer than seven years into their contract, they've never re-signed anyone of importance. I had to scour Basketball Reference's archives just to be sure, but here's two pieces of information that personify their ineptitude: they have never had a single player who played with them for more than seven years who made $10 million in a season with them; and Dwight Howard is the only player in franchise history to sign an extension that gave him a $10 million salary. And, again, they're about to lose him.

So what exactly is going on here? It's one thing for a cold Midwestern team to struggle to attract players and eventually lose the good ones they have. But this is Orlando, a city with a fantastic climate, an array of amusement parks and tourist attractions, and, let's not forget, it's in a state where you don't have to pay an income tax, which is an enormous plus if you happen to be a multimillionaire basketball player. And yet no wants to be there for very long. Weird.

LeBron James: The NBA's Sometimes Nonexistent Superstar

2012-01-20T19:54:50Z

Choking happens to athletes all the time, but that doesn't make it an indictment on the player. In 1997, in Game 5 of a semifinals series against the Jazz, an 18-year-old rookie Kobe Bryant shot not one, not two, but four airballs in the final five and a half minutes of regulation and overtime, in a game his Lakers eventually lost. By any definition, this was choking at its most obvious. Now, 15 years later, Kobe Bryant is regarded as the clutchest player in the NBA by a mile; a 2011 Sports Illustrated poll asked 166 players, "Who do you want shooting with the game on the line?," and a whopping 74% of them chose the Black Mamba. The next closest player, Kevin Durant, got only 8%.

LeBron James wasn't even in the top five.

Like Kobe, LeBron has had some disappearing acts in crunch time, most notably in the 2011 finals. Unlike Kobe, LeBron has become defined by his failures. But LeBron is a totally different animal from Kobe. Kobe resembles Michael Jordan in his brazen willingness to try to take the game over, to take as many contorted, mid-range fade-aways as humanly possible, and to always take the final shot. LeBron is a much more efficient player, even eliminating the weakest aspect of his game, the three-point shot, from his arsenal this season. Often, he seems content to let D-Wade and Chris Bosh take the last shot in the game, and whereas Kobe seems to exhibit a rabid competitiveness -- shown last week when he indignantly referenced an ESPN ranking that had him listed as the seventh best player in the league -- LeBron doesn't seem to have that drive. He was perfectly willing to join the Miami Heat and relinquish his role as the team's alpha dog, as the team leader and primary go-to-guy; it's hard to imagine Kobe willingly accepting a such subservient role.

At the same time, it's hard to believe Kobe wouldn't bristle at having such a pathetic showing in a poll by his peers. LeBron is the best player in the NBA, and not even 2% of player said they wanted him with the ball in the final minutes.

And maybe that's why Kobe is considered clutch and LeBron isn't. Whereas Kobe's imprint is always on the fourth quarter, LeBron will just vanish sometimes for no conceivable reason. With the Heat, he's developed a nasty tendency in the fourth quarter to hand the ball off to one of his teammates and just sit there in the perimeter, not even trying to get open. Not even trying to make a screen, or direct a play, or do anything that makes it look like he's in the offense. It's not even about deferring to Wade or Bosh -- there are times when he simply doesn't try, where he'll allow a gnat like J.J. Barea or Jason Terry to guard him without ever posting them up.

In simplest terms, LeBron James is hiding himself in the offense. Anyone who's ever played basketball can see it. I certainly know what it's like to have an off game, and to make a less concerted effort to find a shot out of fear that maybe I'd get the blame, or let my team down, or look badly. But I'm not an NBA player. LeBron seems to embody that self-consciousness mentality in every fourth quarter he plays. He seems to do as much as he thinks he has to, or as much as he thinks is acceptable, but little else besides that.

There's never been an NBA superstar quite like him. It's one thing to fail, but it's something else entirely to skirt being aggressive altogether. Still, even with his occasional failures in the final minutes and his at times passive demeanor, it's hard to define him as a choker. What he did in Game 5 of the 2007 conference finals against the Pistons, where he scored 29 of the Cavaliers' final 30 points, ranks among one of the greatest clutch performances of all time. And it was his ability to drill key shots in the fourth that allowed the Heat to stage a fourth quarter comeback against the Bulls in Game 5 of last year's conference finals. So whatever his problem is, it's a complex one. There is no clear-cut reason why someone with several brilliant performances in the closing seconds is also the guy unwilling to take 10 shots in the fourth quarter.

I do have a theory however. And if you'll allow me to speculate, I'll slide on my shrinks' glasses as LeBron lies down on the couch...

LeBron James is an incredibly image conscious athlete, who, in a bizarre dichotomy, also has no idea how to manage his image. He is someone with an otherwise stalwart personality, a player with a steady marriage who does good work in the community, who never gets into trouble or gets a DUI or is caught smoking an illegal substance, or anything like that. And yet he is also someone who finds himself among the most hated athletes in sports, who routinely has press conferences or YouTube videos or commercials that manage to get under people's skin. He had the fortitude to turn his "Decision" program into a charity event that gave $3 million to needy children, but wasn't image savvy enough to realize how pompous his televised farewell would play off.

He almost never steps into a position where he's knowingly vulnerable to criticism -- no, not criticism of his general behavior, which he gets plenty of -- criticism of LeBron James the basketball player. The same way Wilt Chamberlain went out of his way to secure his distinction of never fouling out of a single game, to the point that it became a detriment to how hard he played, LeBron is the same way when it comes to avoiding blame.

From the very second he stepped on the court, LeBron has been compared to Michael Jordan, a player with a legacy so perfect that it can't be replicated. LeBron, it seems, doesn't even try to reach those expectations though, because maybe he knows that if he did and failed, people would realize that he isn't Michael Jordan, a revelation that might wound him somehow. Why else would he so clearly avoid taking part in the Slam Dunk Contest, something he even reneged on at one point? Why did he simply appear to give up towards the end of the Celtics/Cavaliers series? Why did it take him more than ten minutes to even attempt a shot in the second half of the Heat's Game 6 loss to Dallas, in a series where he scored just 18 points in the final periods?

Because he does as much as feels he's obligated to, and nothing more. Even in the final game of that Chicago series, there wasn't any risk to those shots he was taking because the Heat were trailing the entire time. And when he was in Cleveland, even if he failed, he always had the safety net of analysts saying, "Well, he has barely anything around him. It's an accomplishment that Cleveland even got that far in the first place." In Miami though, the moment there suddenly became expectations, he suddenly became an incredibly passive player in the closing minutes of games, to the point that he allowed Jason Terry and J.J. Barea to "guard" him in the NBA Finals. This can't be a coincidence. There's no reasonable explanation why LeBron James, in the midst of an otherwise solid 9-15 performance, would go a whopping ten minutes before shooting in Game 6 of the finals. Kobe, Michael, Bird, Magic -- not only would these guys never go that long without taking a shot, they certainly wouldn't do it when they were having an efficient game. But that's the misnomer in James' efficiency numbers -- they're efficient because he's unwilling to try something risky and potentially unsuccessful, even when the team needs it from him.

Is this a perfect theory? Oh good heavens no. Honestly, I can't even rationalize why it's the case, but I think anyone with eyes and enough knowledge of the game can see when a player doesn't want to be a part of the offense. And when that player happens to be the best player in the NBA, there has to be something mental going on -- some sort of warped mentality that's allowed this disappearing act to go on unabated.

Stilt No More: Dwight Breaks a Wilt Free-Throw Record

2012-01-13T14:33:44Z

Dwight Howard shot 39 free-throws on Thursday, breaking a single-game record that had been held by Wilt Chamberlain for nearly 50 years. Chamberlain once attempted 34 foul shots in a game on February 22, 1962 -- just a couple weeks before his absurd 100-point outing against the New York Knicks. Chamberlain, in case you weren't aware, averaged 50.4 points, 25.7 rebounds and 48.5 minutes per game in 1962, in what is unquestionably the most statistically-incomparable single-season in NBA history, and probably sports history. So for a modern day player to actually supplant one of his seemingly-impossible benchmarks really is impressive, even if it's more a record brought on by futility than an actual accomplishment.

Now I can hear what some of you guys are going to say about this: (Or maybe it's dementia kicking in. But either way...) "This is horrible. We don't watch basketball to see a guy go to the line 39 times. It slows the game down and makes it boring to watch. Get it out of the game." And I would be inclined to agree with you... sort of.

If this was an epidemic, if these ridiculous foul-shooting numbers started popping up every other day, with DeAndre Jordan shooting 30 free-throws and Andrew Bogut shooting 20 free-throws, then yeah, I'd say a rule would need to be established to prevent this from happening all the time. However, this was a pretty unusual event. Coming into this game, the most freebies Howard had taken in a game was 14, so I doubt this will become a trend or anything. Plus, as long as it isn't being exploited to the point that it makes the game unwatchable, I don't mind seeing teams take advantage of the one obvious, glaring flaw in Dwight Howard's game.

Another reason why I don't think a rule needs to be enacted to cancel Hack-a-Shaqing is that the teams that do it almost always do so in defeat. The Magic won last night. Shaquille O'Neal, for whom the intentional foul strategy is based off of, had 10 playoff games in 2001 in which he shot 20 free-throws, and the Lakers went 9-1 in those games -- not to mention going 3-0 that year in regular season games where he went to the line 20 times. And the games in 1962 that Chamberlain shot 30 free-throws (the second being the 100-point game)? His team won both games. So let's be clear that while this tactic is annoying to sit through, it's only seen in pure desperation, and isn't something likely to catch on anytime soon.

Tim Tebow and other stuff

2012-01-12T10:48:29Z

So earlier today, I posted something on what I thought was the senseless backlash on the hiring of Penn State coach Bill O'Brien, where people are losing their minds over what a horrible hire it is. To me, it's a fine hire because he has nothing to do with the Joe Paterno-regime, and the fact that some people were actually upset about that irritated the crap out of me.

For the record, I go to Penn State, and I've been ashamed at my university over the last couple months, and not just because of what Sandusky did and what Paterno tolerated. I'm ashamed that the phrase "Penn State Proud" continues to be used. It tears at me every time I hear it. It's loyalty to a faculty that doesn't deserve it, it's indifference to the victims who have every right to hate this school. I am not proud to be attending a school where such a human rights violation could repeatedly take place. There are many words to describe what I feel, but pride isn't one of them. At the moment, there's nothing redeeming in saying you went to this university; not when doing so means blatantly disregarding everything that went on. I mean, Jerry Sandusky was recruiting for the football program as recently as last year; how can I possibly say I respect this school after learning that?

The issue isn't something you can wash your hands of. What happened indelibly stains the reputation of this campus. Child molestation is inarguably the most heinous crime anyone on this planet can commit, so what kind of people are we when we flippantly use the word "proud?" What kind of example are we showing, when we say we're proud knowing full-well what went on? Just what the hell are we proud of anyway, that we can ignore something so terrible that happened so frequently?

More to the point, what exactly have we learned when we criticize the hiring of Bill O'Brien? He was hired specifically to be something different from Paterno, an outsider with no ties to the previous administration, which when informed of the incident in the shower chose to look the other way. To me, this is the only thing that matters about O'Brien. Right now, football is the most inconsequential, irrelevant subject in the world. I really don't care if O'Brien is the worst coach on the planet. All that matters is getting the human-decency part of it right. Besides, even if O'Brien is a lousy couch, who the hell are we to say we deserve better? For three decades, our football program allowed a pedophile to use his status as an assistant to establish a charity, which he in turn used as a farm system to molest as many kids as possible. I don't think I'm saying anything extreme when I write that if Penn State goes 2-10 the next five years, it won't be the most unfair thing in the world. Truth be told, I don't think there should be a football program. You can say what you want about SMU, the last school to receive the death penalty, but as crooked as they were, little kids never got fondled.

And so when I read articles and Facebook statuses and Twitter updates and had face-to-face conversations were people actually told me how upset they were over the hiring, it threw me off the deep end. To me, it just confirmed everything the people in the media have been saying about Penn State. It's unbelievably insensitive to be demanding a better football coach, knowing full-well what a gift it is to even have a football program at all. This is the same campus that threw a riot after Paterno was fired, that formed a vigil around his house as though he was the victim, that promised to walk to his house in the event that they actually won their next game. This is the campus that showed virtually no outrage and anger and fury to the coach that allowed Sandusky to recruit for him, nine years after he was spotted raping a kid in the team locker room. And now, now of all times, the campus gets indignant and upset and furious at their coach… And why? Because they don't like him.

The anger I felt caused me to pen a rather vicious article, in which I expressed how apoplectic I was to be reading such ridiculously lame complaints, like that he had no prior connections to the school. What I wrote had little to do with the SB Nation Penn State blog Black Shoe Diaries, but I referenced a few comments made after the hiring to stress my point, and then finished with an addendum that was mostly an internal dialogue whether or not it was fair to call out a resident SBN blog. What I wrote has since been deleted on the grounds that I thought it was a 'lil too harsh, but for the sake of owning up to what I wrote, here's how the article closed out:

"For the record, I'm not proud of this article. I don't like calling people out, and I think swearing is the easiest path anyone can take in an Internet article. But at the same time, I go to Penn State, and I take this issue incredibly seriously. I've skimmed Black Shoe Diaries for a month now, which has displayed the most pussy-whipped, pacified, ball-less "let's forget about all that and focus on football again" mentality to covering a scandal that I've ever seen, and it boils my blood. I'm sorry, but like it or not, what happened with Jerry Sandusky defines this university. People around the nation look at this school as the "The School Where Kids Got Raped." When something of that horrifying magnitude happens, you write about it every fucking day. You write article after article lighting a fire to the school's ass, castigating everyone even tangentially related to this embarrassment, even if that means pissing on Joe Paterno's legacy. I don't care if the purpose of the blog is ostensibly to focus on the football program -- this is the only Penn State topic that needs to be written about it right now. To write about anything other than that is bullshit of the highest caliber. I don't give a shit who Dave Joyner is, because I know who he's not: Jerry Sandusky."

Yikes. Like I said, kinda harsh.

Truth be told, I made a few mistakes. I probably should have just emailed this to the folks at BSD, rather than publicly voice them out loud. And I probably should have excluded the harsh language, which I'm guessing only managed to turn off some people. (Anger = swear words.) But as for the centric basis of the article, I'll stand behind that. I think it's indefensible to spend a month testing the waters on Paterno without ever fully lambasting him, but to suddenly grow a backbone the moment the new coach isn't experienced enough; it's a disgusting lack of priority, and it's a critique I level at the campus as a whole, which continues to worship the almighty pigskin like it's the only thing in the world that matters. (But anyway, stepping off my soapbox.) Part of being a public site is being open to criticism, and I had the right to criticize what I felt was a passive approach to covering a scandal, the same way the Huffington Post has the right to attack CNN for not covering the war enough. The only difference is that the Huffington Post normally isn't as curse-y as that, and is a little more diplomatic. But I don't think I wrote anything that was a cheapshot or a personal insult; yeah, there were a lot of swear words, but they were mostly added in in between all the criticism. It's not like I called anyone a fuck-wad or anything.

In response, I was called a jackass on BSD today, which is fine. It's their right, and I probably earned it. Anyway, the point of the first half of this post was to show that while I feel bad about posting it publicly, I stand behind the point of the post, and that's really about it. The second half of this post will be about Tim Tebow, as a show of what this blog is actually supposed to be about when I'm not sniping people like a madman. Also, comments are open. I closed them in the original Bill O'Brien post because while I'm fine with receiving negative comments, loud shouting annoys me, and I guessed that that was going to be the response. But if you want to criticize my viewpoint, you're perfectly welcome to here.

Like I said, the article really wasn't about BSD, but I involved them so I felt like writing this self-involved schmaltzy ethics piece on why the word "pussy-whipped" is acceptable, mostly because I actually abhor conflict and was fairly mortified about it how awful my initial tone was. Hopefully, that's the end of it. If this means I get excluded from a few all-night parties at Penn State, so be it.

Anyway, let's talk about Tebow, who I could probably learn a thing or two from. Tebow finished with 316 yards on Sunday, with an average of 31.6 yards per completion, in a game that had its television rating peak at 31.6. The ubiquity of this number, considering how openly religious Tebow is, is fascinating. After all, John 3:16 is probably the most famous numerical verse in the Bible, and it's the one Tim Tebow happened to put on his eyeblack back when he was in college at Florida. It's yet another detail in what's been one of the most incredible sports stories of all time. Even if Tebow completely fades out and gets benched next season for Brady Quinn, he'll still go down as an athlete for the ages, the same way Mark Fydrich's one amazing season in baseball made him a legendary figure.

He really does personify everything we'd want in an underdog story. In most underdog stories, the athlete claims to have been underestimated and disrespected all his life, but we know for a fact that no one really feels that way about him now, so it isn't exactly shocking if he wins. As cool it would be to see Arian Foster go to the Super Bowl after going undrafted, no one won't say that he isn't the best remaining running back in the postseason right now. With Tebow though, that disrespect isn't just semantics. A lot of people still think he's awful, and for good reason. The top three quarterbacks still alive in the playoffs -- Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees -- all have completion percentages near the 70th percentile. Tim Tebow often doesn't even complete 50% of his passes. It's ridiculous that someone with metrics so awful can even be in the realm of the Brees and Rodgers and Bradys of the world, and yet here he is, eight quarters from the Super Bowl.

If he gets to the Super Bowl, this would trump George Mason and Butler and N.C. State as the most shocking tournament run in sports history. Tebow might be one of the five worst quarterbacks in the game, and if replays are any indication, he doesn't even know how to throw a spiral. And more than that, the other quarterbacks in the league are playing at a level unseen in history. Getting to the Super Bowl wouldn't just mean proving all the doubters wrong, it would mean getting passed Brady, and getting passed Manning, and getting passed Brees and so on. It would be utterly improbable, and no one thinks it will happen, but that'll just make it that much cooler if it actually happens.

By the way, if you were wondering just what the hell happened to the John 3:16 guy anyway, I present this ESPN video for your edification.

Rollen Stewart (via cro4167)

O'Brien Bitching: Where PSU Fans Senselessly Gripe About Their New Coach

2012-01-11T12:04:42Z

I'm going to be honest: I know almost nothing about Bill O'Brien. I know he was/is the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots, but the only time I had heard of him before now was when Tom Brady shrieked at him during a Redskins game. (Perhaps provoking O'Brien to look for new work, me thinks.) Besides that, I can't profess to knowing a whole lot about the guy, and I certainly can't make a pronouncement on if he'll be a good coach or not.

But here's what else I know: the people railing against his hiring know just as much about him as I do -- and probably less. And make no mistake about it. People associated with Penn State hate this hiring, with the anger ranging from his lack of ties with the school to the fact that he isn't a big hire. Rather than paraphrase examples, I'll just direct you to some from the SB Nation Penn State blog Black Shoe Diaries, although one particular paragraph from their post-hiring recap caught my attention:

"Dave Joyner (and Ira Lubert, behind the scenes) arrogantly conducted this search with what appeared to be no help or input from anyone else, strung along Tom Bradley and the rest of the remaining coaching staff, acted coy in the media, assured everyone that Penn State knew exactly what it was doing, let the process drag out until the very last weeks of the recruiting period, and came back to us with Bill O'Brien. They proudly strode up to a five-alarm fire, waited six weeks, and threw a Dixie Cup of water on it. Tim Curley's hire of Patrick Chambers -- a mid-major coach tapped to take over a rarely-successful and marginally profitable men's basketball program -- was infinitely more clever and inspired than this."

I can't tell you how annoying it is to hear this debate right now, to witness people actually focus on this hire as though it means anything, as though the school deserves better. It pisses me off that members of my university continue to live in a cult-like vacuum, where the day-to-day decision-making of a doomed program is analyzed without anyone looking around and realizing that it's about as important as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It pisses me off that people are wasting their breath discussing this hire, while only referencing the child molestation fiasco that shook the university to the core as "the scandal" or "the debacle," like it's ancient history. It's insulting, it's sad, it's pathetic, and it makes me ashamed to be even slightly related to this college.

Clearly, we have learned NOTHING from the Jerry Sandusky incident. If there was any maxim the school, and the students, and the athletic program could have adopted in the wake of everything that was discovered, it was that football needed to be less of a priority. It was that human lives and the well-being of children needed to matter more than a geriatric's winning record, and that what happened with Sandusky -- when adults looked away and allowed a pedophile to wear the crest of the school's uniform knowing what he had done -- was a travesty.

So when Penn State went out a brought in a complete outsider, a man with no connections to either Sandusky or JoePa to run the football team, the alums should have understood that this was a good hire, for no other reason than because it was a necessary turn of page from the child-molestation-tolerant regime of Joe Paterno. But instead, I've spent the last week listening to PSU people bitching about the hire as it reflects the football team, saying he has no experience as a coach, saying he has no ties to the school, saying he wasn't a splashy hire. I've read and listened to complaints that have nothing to do with the Sandusky aftermath and everything to do with their on-the-field performance, and what's worse is the people most upset with the hire don't even reference Jerry Sandusky at all.

Instead of adopting that maxim, the Penn State alumni have pissed on it and thrown it out a window. They had one chance to redeem their insane rioting behavior in the wake of Paterno's firing and show that they aren't a lockstep band of idiots too obsessed with football to see what's really important; tragically, all they've done is confirm it.

I rage on in Part 2 after the jump... [explicit]

I'm going to read you the final paragraph posted in the aforementioned Black Shoe Diaries post, and then I'm going to swear.

Adam Collyer: I can't say this isn't an overwhelming disappointment. O'Brien was dead last on my list of interesting NFL assistants, which puts him dead last on my list of acceptable hires. I don't know if this affirms everything ESPN has discussed about Penn State as a "toxic" place right now, but I'm extremely concerned about hiring an NFL coordinator (who apparently doesn't have much to do with the gameplanning of his own team and would prefer to be an NFL head coach) and a career college position coach/coordinator with no head coaching experience. This is a failure on every level for Dave Joyner and Ira Lubert. Still, I'll attempt to give Bill O'Brien the benefit of the doubt. He's our coach and deserves our support. But there's no good will here right now like there was for Paterno. Start regularly going 8-4 or worse and you can show yourself out.

So, you don't like the hire? Well guess what... YOU DON'T DESERVE A COACH YOU LIKE!!!!!!!! No shit you're not happy with the guy running the football team! No one wants to go to the school where little kids got raped! No one gives a shit about the football program anymore - that's part of the consequences! And by the way, don't you dare delude yourself into thinking that the football team deserves better, because IT DOESN'T. This school deserves everything it's about to get; it deserves enrollment to drop by the thousands, it deserves philanthropists to withdraw their funding, it even deserves the Death Penalty, because no college scandal ever allowed anything in the realm of what happened at Penn State. For Christ's sake, kids got raped in the locker room of the team shower! Penn State is lucky that the football program even exists at all, and you seriously want to write about how disappointed you are that the new guy didn't meet your super-secret criteria, and that it's "a failure on every level for Dave Joyner"? Yeesh.

I know that's not very kind of me, and I know I could have expressed my thoughts clearer than just swearing a lot. But I really don't feel like being poetic about it, not when members of my university are this goddamn oblivious to the entire freaking reason Bill O'Brien was brought in in the first place. This is like an inmate on death row complaining that his final meal wasn't up to his liking; it's a staggering inability to show any perspective at all.

If moving on means hiring a completely unknown dude who you know nothing about, then that's what you do, because the only thing this school can do is move away from everything that happened. To spend even a second criticizing the hire on the grounds of a football decision isn't just pointless (because seriously, what respectable human being will go to Penn State now?), it's a tacit slap in the face to every one of Jerry Sandusky's victims. It's a brazen admission that above all else, football still matters more than anything, and that the only lesson that could have been learned from this catastrophe hasn't even been considered.

If Bill O'Brien really is a shitty hire, then too bad. We lost the right to be picky when a kid was anally raped in the shower, and yeah, I'm going to keep repeating that because there has to come a point when we slap ourselves in the face and realize, "God, football doesn't mean a fucking thing, does it?" The moment that incident occurred, and the dozens of other incidents occurred, we lost the right to demand anything from the football program, the same way those kids lost their childhoods when grown men decided Jerry Sandusky the football coach was more important than Jerry Sandusky the child molester.