Joe Paterno has finally, after ten years of denial and sheltering a child rapist, taken a moment to do something. He has spoken out for a change and for action to be taken, and it’s amazing…I thought my respect for the guy had hit bottom, but no, he had miles to dig further.
I shall pass this one on to a fine angry rant at the Atheist Camel:
His termination by Penn State was right and proper, and that would have been the end of it save any legal actions that might befall him as a result of his inaction. I’d have had nothing to comment upon, no further ax to grind with him. But then he said this:
“As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,”
And there, in that one sentence is the very heart of the grotesqueness of religion, the very core of what I have raged about, fought against, and endeavored to put a face on for these many years all summed up nice and tidy by a disgraced coach.
PRAYER?? Say a PRAYER for the child victims? You self righteous sanctimonious jerk… some of those kids are victims partially because you failed as a man. You relinquished your responsibility as a human being. Your hubris and self interest over shadowed those victims interest. But, now, NOW you’ll implore us to mumble words to a nonexistent thing in the sky as though that will fix things? As though those kids’ lives will be repaired by words to a deity when your own misbehavior, self-serving actions, or apathy was a causal factor for their pain?
When you’re at the very bottom of a pit, when you’ve failed egregiously at basic human decency, there’s always that one last recourse for the scoundrel and coward: turn to Jesus and hope that piety will buoy your reputation up a little bit. It’s sad, too, that it often seems to work with that credulous majority.
It’s interesting how much loathing Paterno’s remarks have inspired here. Let us make public piety a repulsive act!
If you really need to puke, look at this video, where students have a sign that says “Two of my favorite J’s in life: Jesus and JoePaterno”. It also says he plans to coach this weekend. Is it too much to hope he’s met by the police and turned away?
Oh, man, it just gets worse and worse. There was a press conference at PSU, and the media and students embarrassed themselves. They were questioning the firing of Joe Paterno by raising the spectre of what is good for the university and the football program. Allen Barra has the best and strongest answer…what the PR flacks should have said.
Angry student: Was any consideration given as to how his would affect the football program?
Me: The football program? The football program?? Are you serious? A former assistant coach was just indicted for over 40 counts related to sexual assault on a child, your football coach was fired in disgrace, your athletic director has been indicted for perjury, and a current assistant coach will, I’m sure, soon be fired. And the crimes against humanity — against children — took place in the university’s athletic facilities. Do you think you will even have a football program when the full extent of this becomes known?
Do you even think you’re going to have a university?
I made the point the other day that sports programs can develop an undue and even pathological effect on academic programs, but that a winning season does have a surprisingly powerful effect on enrollments. This is quite possibly the most catastrophic disaster I’ve ever heard of hitting an athletic program, and it’s at a university that has always made a huge deal of their football team. Barra’s article emphasizes the financial hit the university is about to take — a whole department sheltering a pedophile for more than a decade? They are about to cough up more in legal fees than my university spends on operating costs — but it will be interesting to see what happens to enrollments next year. It’s going to hurt. I hope it hurts a lot…not because I have any animus against PSU, but because I hope the students who planned to go there will discover a shred of conscience.
I just threw up in my mouth reading that. What a sorry excuse for a human being.
I gagged when I saw this. Well, Joe did as little as possible before so why not continue with a lovely tradition of doing the same thing now? Nothign fails like prayer and nothing show how impotant and imaginary this “god” is.
The desperate last resort of a scoundrel is invoking the supernatural; I’m not surprised.
In other words, JoePa (what a puke inducing grandfatherly name for such scum) is pleading the “I might have possibly screwed up (this is not an amission of guilt), but let’s just forget about the whole thing because GOD!!!”
Also, that was one fine rant.
I am not a violent person. I don’t advocate violence as a way to solve problems or gain appropriate retribution. But damn, I want to slap him across the face for saying that.
I saw his comment elsewhere. An atheist friend of mine had a thread going about the PSU grotesquerie. A religionista chimed in with her comforting wisdom that Sandusky would be judged by god after his death. Needless to say, I had a bit of a rant.
I also remarked that JoPa said that the students should “say a little prayer” for the kids involved. I had another rant on this subject as well. My contention is that it is useless to pray to a god that doesn’t exist and that everyone would be better served by ensuring this kind of thing doesn’t happen again and that the boys involved get the help they need.
Arrogant religious pricks really piss me off.
Oh, don’t worry about it… Sandusky will get slapped around by god once he’s dead. PUH-LEEZE.
If he wanted to get judged by god after his death, he should have waited until he was dead and in hell to rape little boys. Since he went ahead and did it here, he’s going to have to deal with the consequences here too.
Oh, and for a bit of a kicker, there’s this :
Turns out that he is going to hang around a bit longer before he’s gone for good. Just a few days or weeks, according to the article. Just enough time to get a few games under his belt.
Oh, and yeah, I’m sure the prayers will help now. Damn shame Jesus doesn’t often fire up the ol’ Time Machine. Bet Paterno wishes that Jesus would let him use it. Maybe that’s the prayer Paterno should be making, in order to not just pretend that he’s less of a fucker?
What.
The.
FUCK.
That article is dated Nov. 8.
I’m glad to hear they have their priorities straight.
\sarcasm
Paterno has been fired as of Wed night. He will not be coaching on Saturday.
I happened to go to PSU and am utterly disgusted with Paterno and how he has responded.
I am also disgusted with my fellow alumni and the student body that have closed ranks behind Paterno characterizing him as the media’s scapegoat.
It has been really hard for me to get on facebook and see such tribalism among people that I perhaps naively thought would put the ideals Paterno supposedly stood for above the man himself.
But I should have realized that he is really a deity to most Penn Stater’s.
I’m going to State College today, and I am very concerened that all my friends have drank the kool aid and will view any criticism of Paterno as unfair. Meanwhile, they will chant “JOE PA-TER-NO!” over and over again.
I may come home early.
http://www.jesuslovesbags.com/2011/11/legends-and-leaders-not-at-penn-state.html
Weird – when I loaded the page with scripts blocked, the byline date wasn’t there (it’s a script?) Good news that it was a pre-firing article, not post.
JesusLovesBags – good luck. I don’t envy you the day you’ll probably have. :(
Makes sense–they’ve got a lot in common. They’re both given god-like status by the organizations they preside over, and they both protect child rapists within that organization.
Though in defense of Jesus, he’s long dead and largely, if not entirely, mythical.
Oh, it’s the least he could do. I’m sure if anything even less occurs to him, he’ll do that instead.
Yeah he’s not coaching on Saturday and McQueary isn’t either.
But McQueary still has a job.
Empty words from an empty person. The sad thing is that so many will see that as meaningful. The poison seeps.
If he had taken action years ago, the first allegations that I am aware of date back to 1998*, and made the comment that we should pray for the victims, I would have taken the statement as a sentiment of sympathy and sadness for the victims. If he had acted properly and tried to protect the children first instead of attempting to protect Penn State, his statement would have come across, to me, as someone trying to remind us of the real victims. I would have taken the whole “say a prayer” thing as a heartfelt desire to help the victims.
But that’s not what happened. He brushed it under the rug. He enabled the child rapist. He acted in the interest of himself and Penn State. In light of that, his statement “say a little prayer” is complete fucking pandering. He doesn’t give a shit about the kids. They are just an afterthought, just like that fucking statement. He took no actions when he could prevented future attacks. He didn’t act to help the child that he knew was attacked in 2002. So now he wants to pray for the fucking kids? That’s his fucking answer? Fuck Joe Paterno.
And the other problem I’m having is the word “little.” Okay, let’s play make believe. There’s a God and he listens to prayers. This is what we believe for the moment. So, when we learn about the child victims of rape, why the fuck should we just say a “little” prayer for them? If we believe there’s a bigass God out there that listens to this shit, why are we saying big prayers for these children? Why are just saying “hey, God, if you gotta minute, you want to help out these kids? kthxbye.” So the whole word “little” further reinforces the idea that this was just a fucking afterthought.
Enough of pretend-land, back to reality where prayer is useless. Which is what his entire statement is: useless. It was just a fucking afterthought. He didn’t think of those kids then, and he isn’t thinking of them now. Fuck Joe Paterno.
Woo, I’m relieved that the article was out of date. Just thought that the “prayer” bit was recent (as in: happened yesterday), so when I found an article referencing it, I was shocked to see it mention that he might still coach a game. Glad to see that I was wrong :)
appalling.
When it comes to prayer, doing nothing costs time. So, when Good Christians and Upstanding Citizens TM have to pray for starving children in Africa, all the kids that have been preyed upon by priests, all the gays, women who have abortions for the fun of it, etc. it’s difficult to find time to pray for just one more. So, he asks them to take a little time in order to encourage them to invest a bit more of their doing fuck all time for these children.
Gut reaction, for what it’s worth:
There’s an old, stale, tired, but oh-so-true assessment of apologies after the fact: Words are cheap.
You know what else is cheap? Smarmy religious platitudes. Particularly when used to dodge responsibility. “Oh, I’m sooooooo sorry I buggered your kid, but now I’ve found Jeebus and it’s all okay now. I’ll send him a get well card with Jeebus on the front.”
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
We may sneer at Alcoholics Anonymous for their inclusion of “a higher power” in their 12-step program, but at least one thing in that program is absolutely right: the need to make amends for one’s wrong doing. Hey, ex-coach, pederasty-enabling Palerno: what are you doing to actually make amends? Sold your house yet and donated the proceeds to an effective child abuse prevention charity? Donned sackcloth and ashes and crouched in the gutter holding a sign saying “I’m an asshole, I favor buggering kids, kick me hard”?
I swear, these xters are just as bad as Moslems (possibly worse) in using their deity as an excuse for non-action. The Moslems believe in the Will of Allah as an explanation for anything you care to name; the xters think that invoking the name of Jeebus excuses them from action.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
I hope the sovereign state of Pennsylvania arrests, tries, and convicts everybody who knew about this abuse and puts them behind bars for a good, long time.
RFW said: “I hope the sovereign state of Pennsylvania arrests, tries, and convicts everybody who knew about this abuse and puts them behind bars for a good, long time.”
yes!
and when they are in jail and getting raped by fellow inmates, we can all say a little fucking prayer for them too. assholes.
*SLAP*
You’re not funny. First step in curing that deficiency: stop making (prison) rape jokes.
rob, @24:
Rape does not make rape better. Let the theists cackle and hoggle themselves over such things. There are better things in life than to indulge in petty sexual revenge fantasies.
Hey, God! I messed up big time. Fix everything up, wontcha? That’s a good boy!
-Joe
sorry. it doesn’t make it right.
i just can’t believe that someone would just bat an eye at what happened to the children.
Too bloody right! The football season should be cancelled and the team should be out of the league for, oh, ten years or so. The university, however, must honour its contracts for all football scholarships so that incoming individuals are not punished for a failure of the administration and coaching staff.
You are absolutely correct. Yet, the NCAA has already said that it has no authority to put any kinds of sanctions in place against Penn State for this, so the only chance of that happening would be if Penn State sanctioned itself.
However, illegal (to the NCAA’s rules, not to any real laws) recruiting was enough to get Southern Methodist University’s football program shut down for two seasons.
Wiki:
I’m not defending cheating, but when compared to child rape, how bad was paying some college kids to play football?
I’m not an atheist, but more and more, I see why people are. When religion should be exhorting, encouraging, and strengthening us in standing up for what is good and right, it’s just become a shabby bit of stage dressing to hide our transgressions behind.
I’m utterly heartbroken, and I have no effing idea who Joe Paterno is.
Don’t be so quick to castigate what happened at Penn State. We must not forget the effect of the seventies on the moral landscape of our nation.
“We must not forget the effect of the seventies on the moral landscape of our nation.”
Uh…the AFL-NFL merger?
…Disco?
…
I got it! Soft Rock! Now I understand what you’re getting at!
For those who missed it, this was the Church’s defense
Argh, that’s right. How could I forget the bestest excuse of all time?
Gingerbaker, you are neither funny nor insightful.
Just a very low grade troll.
You know, when you see students from Penn State minimizing or dismissing the ethical ramifications of this affair, and defending a continued hagiography of Joe Paterno – even making him the equal of Jesus Christ on that protest sign – you have to wonder how much of this dementia might be laid squarely at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church.
Who, contrary to their oft-proclaimed moral leadership, may have been instrumental in lowering the moral indignation to the crime of child rape in this situation, in this country, and perhaps around the world.
janine still an asshole:
“Gingerbaker, you are neither funny nor insightful”
Nonetheless, I remain debonair.
What really bothers me is that the students that are defending this guy? Would have been the right age to be victims WHEN PATERNO KNEW ABOUT IT.
YOU COULD HAVE BEEN A VICTIM HE IGNORED YOU STUPID BUTTWIPES!
How can you possibly defend him? It could have been you! You think the kids that were raped, that are now YOUR AGE, are watching this and feeling okay because their peers are saying that what happened to them NOT BEING REPORTED UNTIL THEY ARE ADULTS isn’t horrible?
Fuck prayers, how about some reparations for these people? I’m sure they don’t want a scholarship to PSU, but there must be something concrete that can be done.
@Janine
I think you missed the Catholic apologetic he was referencing. IE that the Church was influenced by that huge wave of counter culture shift in the 70s where everyone though child rape was good.
Is it possible that by asking people to pray for the victims, the coach also intends to invoke the Christian duty to forgive sinners? Has anyone else noticed that this whole Christian “forgiveness” thing seems to function as a defence of the status quo? (More powerful people are forgiven much more easily, in my experience.)
The decision to fire Paterno, et al, isn’t what marred the football program.
The decision of the program’s leader, et al, to overlook an ongoing and heinous crime spree against the incredibly vulnerable is what has marred the football program.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard for people to put blame squarely where it belongs: at the feet of Sandusky and those who abetted his crimes.
As for why he said what he did, reminding his supporters to pray for the victims, that is clearly a cynical ploy intended to burnish his image as JoePa, quiet old Grandpa figure.
It was calculated to work with an image he has consciously tended.
You fucking moron. If your imaginary sky-daddy were real, you wouldn’t have to be praying for little kids who have been raped.
Paterno has forgotten two of the lessons: first: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Second: it’s best to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Of course, Paterno no doubt believes he’s being victimized. To say his response sickens me is to say that the Titanic is a bit overdue.
Now, for the happy spoiled privileged children of Penn State:
Yes, you, kiddies. You who get the happy time in which to try to learn something besides how to hold your liquor. You who are upset at your precious Coach being fired. Hows about for once in your miserable privileged lives you manage to think of someone else ? Of something else besides what a big Buzz-kill not having “coach” around tomorrow is going to be. Hows about thinking of those young boys ? the ones who were assaulted and or raped by Sanduskey,who was protected by your coach, among others.
Your beloved Coach, whose job also includes a moral responsibility to protect the youths in his charge and to compel his subordinates to also enforce that protection.
A job which he failed at.
Well, and, some of them may also be realizing that Penn State may not be the safest place for them, either.
You know what pisses me off the most about this statement? That Paterno has the gall to claim any kind of moral leadership about what people should do or say to support children who were victims of rape. He’s not talking about what he, personally, is going to do, he’s still acting as the leader he claimed to be and is directing others actions and giving advice and instructions as if he’s still someone that people should listen to when it comes to…well, anything regarding ethics.
The fact that he brings God into it – in order to absolve himself even further or responsibility – that just makes it worse. But even without it, he’s still claiming to be someone that people should listen to and look up to when it comes to the ethics of helping victims. That alone is a slap in the face to the victims themselves…and furthers the harm that was done to them. Not just emotionally, but by continuing to minimize the importance of being ethical.
People fucking disgust me. The correct response to what happened at Penn is outrage *at* Paterno and the rest of the rape enablers, not outrage on his fucking behalf.
Nevermind those kids who were harmed! This will have a negative effect on our ability to kick an oblong ball at some painted poles!
SMU was a relatively small program and, from what I understand, was sort of the sacrificial lamb for scaring the bigger ones. I’m not sure if the NCAA would have the chutzpah to actually slap any larger school with such a penalty (like, oh say, Miami).
PZ,
Thanks for including my Atheist Camel rant about this despicable affair in your posting.
It really tweaked my hump to see any appeal to religiosity fall from the lips of a man who, for all intents and purposes, did exactly what the Catholic church has done for years…ignore the problem.
Whadda mean, Rey? Since SMU, the NC2A smacked down such powerful athletic programs like Morehouse College Men’s Soccer and MacMurray College Men’s Tennis.
Those guys aren’t messing around.
Yeah, I remember feeling quite guilty that not only had I not raped any children, I couldn’t even make myself want to.
Is anyone seriously surprised to hear an apologist for paedophilia taking refuge in religion?
Let’s be frank about this. Organised religion (of all flavours) and “kiddy-fiddling” have been comfortable bed fellows for millenia.
And once again I return to FTB for some fresh air after doing some reading at ESPN.com.
All the columnists I’ve read there have it right–they were calling for Paterno to be fired immediately, rather than being allowed to coach out the season as he originally planned.
I wouldn’t recommend reading any comments on those articles, however.
There’s a news article there today about former Penn State players rallying to show support for old Joe, though, and one former player is starting a fund for Sandusky’s legal defense. Yeah, he deserves his day in court, but how many of us would be forced to rely on a public defender if accused of a crime? Gah.
Another former player, a guy who also played in the NFL, got it right when he castigated the students for forgetting about the real victims in this case. Then he steps over the batshit line by comparing those students to OWS protesters.
As for the NCAA, they did recently hammer the University of Southern California, one of the biggest football powers, with penalties for gross recruiting violations and improper player benefits. Those penalties included vacating past wins, loss of scholarships and no post-season games, which costs them money and players. Unfortunately, by the time those sanctions came down, the coach (Pete Carroll) had skipped to a high-paying NFL job.
The NCAA is much better at punishing schools and players than it is coaches.
Saw this article in the paper today: Reporters under Paterno’s spell:
time for me to get one of these bumperstickers:
“Prayer. It’s the least you can do.
Seriously.”
Just got breaking news alert: PSU places McQueary on administrative leave..
Read the Onion’s take on Paterno.
Chilling …
Nurse Ingrid
I prefer this bumper sticker:
PRAYER: When you only care enough to do nothing.
SMU was a relatively small program and, from what I understand, was sort of the sacrificial lamb for scaring the bigger ones. I’m not sure if the NCAA would have the chutzpah to actually slap any larger school with such a penalty (like, oh say, Miami).
No.
SMU’s other programs may have been rather limited, but their football program was not. Back then, it was roughly equivalent to that of USC or Baylor. The wealthy alumni insisted on it. They were the best team in all of college football in the early 80s, with their Pony Express backfield.
I was living in Dallas during the Pony Express years, and the money the players had to play with was staggering.There was too much money being thrown around, by too many people, too obviously. Eric Dickerson had originally signed with Texas A&M, but suddenly backed out and went to SMU–and had a new car that his local newspaper had written about him getting right after he signed? Come on! That’s blatant!
The problem was what it always was in Texas: Too many rich assholes who thought they could do whatever they wanted to get a great football team.
As for the NCAA, they did recently hammer the University of Southern California, one of the biggest football powers, with penalties for gross recruiting violations and improper player benefits. Those penalties included vacating past wins, loss of scholarships and no post-season games, which costs them money and players. Unfortunately, by the time those sanctions came down, the coach (Pete Carroll) had skipped to a high-paying NFL job.
The NCAA is much better at punishing schools and players than it is coaches.
And Reggie Bush has vacated his Heisman that should have gone to UT’s Vince Young, anyway.
Trojan football came back from the dead, and then got put right back into its grave. I bet everyone at USC is thrilled, but who cares what they think? They’re assholes.
Clueless and reactionary as ever, Janine.
Either my daughter’s mother is simply twisting the program’s doctrine again, or “making amends” does not have to include any actual attempt at making amends; brief verbal self-flagellation suffices.
Shhhh!! That doesn’t matter because Gingerbaker has the wrong set of beliefs about Rebecca Watson, therefore must be a “very low grade troll”.
So will they rename the team the Penn State Pedophiles? The fightin’ Pedos? Sandusky’s Rockets? I know this isn’t a scandal involving the players (as far as has been revealed) but I’m pretty sure angry football kid is going to HATE the characterizations of his schools team from here out. Did anybody protecting the coaching staff think about that?
truthmachine: Is there any thread you won’t attempt to derail with that nonsense?
Aquaria wrote:
I don’t really understand why the college football players aren’t paid in the first place. As I understand it, the money earned from NCAA games doesn’t go into the general college budget, but plenty of its costs do. The people making money from them are the administrators, coaches, TV stations, and the NCAA itself.
Whoa. What the hell happened?
“Your logic is not like our Earth logic.” Buffy Summers
That’s all I can think about when I see these students rioting in support of Paterno. Rioting. When there’s so much worth rioting about, they choose to support a pedophile-protecting football coach. This situation makes me so sick to my stomach.
On the plus side, I was thinking of moving back home to PA and going back to school. I can say what school definitely WON’T be getting my money. I just wouldn’t feel safe at a school with so many corn-fed idiots.
Perhaps he is intending to imply that this is what he did, and that it should have been good enough, putting it in the hands of a higher power than the law.
No matter what, Paterno is an asshole.
The strangest part of it for me is that Paterno is somehow considered an important person. There’s a bunch of “all the good he did for the school” talk floating around.
I mean he’s a football coach, right? A phys ed teacher at the collegiate level…… at a public university. I seriously doubt there are many groundbreaking innovations to be made in moving a leather ball down a grass field.
One of the few valuable things that one might actually learn from playing football is ethics and he obviously has a shortage in that department so why is he considered to be some sort of genius?
“As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,”
Just a little one, eh? Oh, right, you’re all very busy people, with places to go, things to do, graven images to worship (that’s them, over there in the trophy case. Ooh, pretty…). And I know you’re all really sorry to have to be doing this now, after the fact, when it’s TOO FUCKING LATE TO DO ANY GODDAM GOOD!
And who are you gonna pray to, by the way? I mean, just curious, because, after all, wasn’t it that all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent, loving sky buddy of yours that allowed this to happen in the first place? “Every sparrow that falls”, and all that shit?
But then, I have to wonder why, since you’re all so convinced that prayer works, you all haven’t been saying a nightly prayer for all the children in the world, THAT THEY NOT GET BUGGERED BY SOME FUCKING PERVERT! Because that would solve the problem, right? Um, right?
Geez. I hope not!
And, once again, foolish people like Paterno think that prayer does some good. Except maybe for lowering the blood pressure of the god-botherer during the devotional practice, it’s just a waste of time. That’s why I encourage it.
Zeno
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’re doing your best.”
is brilliant!
“As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,”
So… this guy enabled a child molester for years, resulting in a lot more kids being raped than if he had gone to the authorities, and his idea to help the victims is to suggest that we all do something that’s notoriously ineffective?
What a jag off.
I think the word I’m looking for is smug.
On the topic of his own moral failures he addresses the lowly masses with the tone of:
“now let this be a lesson to all of you out there”
Smug. Fucking smug.
I’m a PA resident that works with children. I’m automatically a mandated reporter of child abuse. If I witness, hear of, another/or have a child confide in me, I must, by law, contact childline in Harrisburg, then my local CYS. Failure to do so can result in the loss of my license, 5 years in prison, and/or a $50,000 fine, and of course all three. If the Penn State offenders are not prosecuted, then apparently the law is useless. How utterly sad.
Are the coaching staff at Penn State mandated reporters of child abuse? I haven’t heard anything to the effect that they are. It seems it would have been caught by the media if they were.
How was it there were kids much younger than college age in the changing rooms without a parent in the first place?
Too many rich assholes who thought they could do whatever they wanted to get a great football team.
I don’t really understand why the college football players aren’t paid in the first place. As I understand it, the money earned from NCAA games doesn’t go into the general college budget, but plenty of its costs do. The people making money from them are the administrators, coaches, TV stations, and the NCAA itself.
It was never the NCAA’s intention to become a training camp for professional sports, and the advent of professional sports is why the NCAA is the mess it is now.
Most of the sports leagues out there didn’t exist at all when college sports was getting organized around the turn of the century; only Major League Baseball did. And what happened in baseball only ten years after the NCAA was organized?
It’s only normal that the NCAA and its member colleges didn’t want that kind of corruption happening to them. It was believed that keeping the sports amateur so that athletes did it as a side thing while students in college would keep corruption out of college sports. In fact, keeping sports amateur and maintaining a tight rein on the influence of the outside world on college sports actually helped the NCAA to grow in stature and credibility.
The NCAA was also formed before the real troublemaker to amateur athletics came along: TV. TV is the #1 reason why amateur athletics has gone haywire and why the money is so insane, which makes bullshit like this PSU scandal more likely to happen.
Professional sports leagues had co-existed with NCAA member colleges for literally decades (in the case of MLB) without the former affecting the latter much or vice versa, if at all.
But when TV brings all those sports into everyone’s living rooms, they’re getting watched, and the advertising dollars started roll in. In a naive effort to keep the influence of TV ad revenues from changing the core idea of amateur competition, the deal that the NCAA (aka the colleges) cut with,ABC in the old days was that a college’s share of TV revenue went to the college general revenue stream, not to players.
Colleges are not going to let the athletes get a cut of a gravy train that has made a lot of them incredibly rich, or richer (Big oil + big TV revenue = :::Cough::: UT Austin :::Cough:::). Athletes will not get money. Not now. Not ever. It’s the colleges that have all the power and money, the colleges who have the authority to negotiate with the networks. The athletes are merely lucky individuals who are passing through for 4 years at a time.
I forget that not everybody’s a baseball junkie like me, so I probably need to explain what happened in baseball in 1919, only 9 years after the NCAA was formed: The Black Sox scandal, where eight players of the Chicago White Sox intentionally lost games so that they could make a killing by gambling in betting parlors that they’d lose. Among the players banned for life from baseball was the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson, who many still dispute as having taken part in the gambling, considering how well he played in the series. If you’ve seen Field of Dreams, this scandal is a major element in the film’s theme of redemption and forgiveness.
You can take it to the bank that the fledgling NCAA didn’t want any part of a scandal like that; it would ruin everything they were trying to do. Hence why they made sure college athletics would be amateur athletics, to reduce the chances of players being bought off (HA!).
As I understand it, the money earned from NCAA games doesn’t go into the general college budget, but plenty of its costs do.
No.
Individual colleges, or the conferences representing colleges, negotiate the TV rights. The colleges, or their conferences, aren’t going to provide all those lawyers and staff to give the money only to the athletic department.
The money goes where the college decides it will go.
By explicit state law, you mean?
Or by, y’know, basic standards of human decency?
Yeah, I’ll bet that when it was decided to fire the demigod Coach, no consideration was given to its effect on the football program. FFS.
Cluebat: That program obviously needs some affecting.
About enrollment: I myself know a kid (son of a colleague) who chose to go to Penn State (even though not from PA) sepcifically because he enjoys sports and wanted to be part of a big-sports scene (btw, people who have never experienced a full-on Division I football Saturday–complete with drunken student sections, tens of thousands of drunken alumni, huge bands and cheerleaders and mascots and ethanol–are almost certainly underestimating its overwhelming nature).
Thing is, he also has the opportunity for an excellent education while there. This is going to have knock-on effects on the departments of Biology, Music, Ag, etc. And while the football program can go fuck itself with a jopa as far as I’m concerned, what sucks is that a lot of people who are there for all the right reasons are going to be screwed as well.
It’s tradition. Like the temporary (but admittedly inconvenient) 3-day human sacrifice an immortal godling played along with in order to take all the sins in the world unto himself. Make sense? Not to me, either.
If you say so, it must be true.
Paterno knew that somebody had said he saw a crime occur, and he did nothing to except report it to his boss. Naturally, he’s guilty of that crime, just as we are all, by extension, guilty of genocide in Sudan.
This is a case of he said he saw him do, and Paterno was neither the witness nor the boss. You guys need to rethink your concept of guilt.
I’m an atheist, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
According to that ridiculous line, no one should judge anyone ever.
Maybe you should rethink.. well, just start thinking in general. Paterno is guilty of doing the least he could and keeping silent for years, while the rapist was free to rape more children.
You fucking asshole
He worked with him for 9 fucking years knowing he raped children.
I mean who DOESN’T Have a few gigabytes of kiddy porn on their hard-drive!?
Also because we all had the power to ‘fire’ Sudan or report Sudan to a police officer.
You’re basically saying everyone who saw someone jump off a building is guilty of killing him because we didn’t fly to catch him or travel back in time to give him psychological treatment.
JoePoe however, could act and didn’t.
It isn’t just Penn State. A little article that barely made news about my local town and high school (just a mile down the road from where I live):
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_jersey&id=8428993
Apparently a segment of the Wayne Hills High School football team (9 including the 18 year old captain of the team) beat up on two students from Wayne Valley High School after some disagreement at a party. Both victims were briefly hospitalized and one was unconscious for a few minutes. The nine alleged assailants were allowed to play this Friday evening because, apparently, the students can not be penalized for actions that occurred off of school grounds.
This has produced various levels of outrage and controversy in the community. See comments at the end of this news story:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/11/11/group-attack-allegedly-by-h-s-football-players-splits-nj-community/
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/penn-state-timeline.php
late, but damnit, i’m in tn, forgive me.
I’m personally a bit disgusted by the jabs at Penn State. Don’t get me wrong – I am far more appalled at the actions of the perpetrator, the cover-up by those who knew, and by the rioting students whining about their football program. But making hasty generalizations about all of PSU is unbecoming of people who pride themselves in their rationalism.
SOME administrators here committed massive moral failings. SOME students rioted about it. Yes, some – that certainly wasn’t 50,000 students. Have you seen the footage? Most students are in the street because something big is happening. To me it looked like only a minority are actually rioting, and those idiots would probably riot if the Jersey Shore were canceled. And you are deluding yourselves if you think college students in your own hometowns and universities would have been little angels.
A candlelight vigil was held for the victims by the students. Students and alumni have already raised a quarter of a million dollars in two days to help victims of sexual abuse. It’s naturally painful to see a figure like Paterno fall. If you want to put their response in context, think of your father being accused of such a thing. You wouldn’t immediately lose all emotional attachment and call him a monster. This campus has to mourn, and it is coming through it and doing the right thing.
Penn State is bigger than the football program, Paterno, and Spanier. It is home to MacArthur genius fellows, National Medal of Science winners, and the world’s largest student-run philanthropy (raising nearly $10 million for pediatric cancer research last year alone). It is a leading university in education and research. I just wish everyone would target their criticisms at those who deserve it, and not everyone who has any connection to Penn State (who, by the way, are even more deeply angered due to the hatred it has drawn on them as well.)
TheFrog,
the problem is that you even have to say that Penn State is bigger than its football program. This shouldn’t be an issue at all. The fact that athletics have become soo overblown in importance is one of the issues of American academia.
Also, you sound like trying to softpedal it. Face it, the freaking president of the university was made aware of the charges in 2002, yet failed to act. Don’t try to explain this away as some problem confined to the football program. If this were the case, the administration would have cleaned up the football program back in 2002.
Saying that not 50,000 students protested and rioted is also not relevant. The fact that the first reactions of a vocal part of the students was to riot in favour of Paterno was a huge blow to the university’s reputation. If this wasn’t representative of the university community, where were all these candlelight vigils WHEN the scandal broke loose?
“Also, you sound like trying to softpedal it. Face it, the freaking president of the university was made aware of the charges in 2002, yet failed to act. Don’t try to explain this away as some problem confined to the football program.”
I don’t intend to softpedal anything. I just want us to be realistic. I wouldn’t care for being judged by foreigners on the actions of the Tea Party and George W. Bush. There are fanatics, and some of them are leaders. That doesn’t necessarily make it a pervasive problem.
“Saying that not 50,000 students protested and rioted is also not relevant. The fact that the first reactions of a vocal part of the students was to riot in favour of Paterno was a huge blow to the university’s reputation.”
I didn’t argue that it doesn’t hurt the reputation of the school. I only argued that it is unfair to judge the majority by the actions of the minority, and that it is unfair to judge Penn State students as any different than students elsewhere who have never been ‘tested’ in this way.
“If this wasn’t representative of the university community, where were all these candlelight vigils WHEN the scandal broke loose?”
Like I said, there was lots of grief at the loss of a father figure. I don’t think you know what JoePa is like in Happy Valley. The man has restaurants and flavors of ice cream named after him. Can you really turn your back on someone so easily? We all want to defend our own initially, before reason takes over. I agree – it would have been much better if either a) the students immediately held a vigil or b) they rioted after hearing about the scandal rather than the firing. But let us not judge an entire campus too harshly.
Actually that’s exactly what it makes it.
Holy shit you’re a moron.
Do you have trouble reading and understanding the instructions for instant oatmeal?
“Actually that’s exactly what it makes it.”
But that says nothing about YOU (assuming you are an American). It only says something about some people in the country you live in. And it also says nothing about whether America has more nutjobs than other countries. Likewise the incidents at Penn State speak to a problem, but not to a problem that is pervasive among the student body, faculty, and administration, nor does it necessarily indicate that Penn State is worse than other campuses for which this problem never arose (and for which, therefore, we cannot judge how they would have handled it).