Notre Dame has had pretty good recruiting classes in some years, actually. They’ve managed to suck anyway, partly because they’re overhyped and keep scheduling games against better teams.
It won’t be. On the other hand being associated with the school would be a little embarrassing.
Yes, I do.
And this is one college football team, not a global religion.
I love sports, so I don’t need them explained to me. And that’s just as well, because your explanation was largely wrong. Fandom is much more about emotional attachment than meritocracy. If sports were a meritocracy, why would so many people love scrubs who give their all and old stars who are past their prime while they rag on superstars player who are spoiled or personality-deficient? An important element - maybe the most important one - is your personal connection to the team or player. For almost everyone, there are limits to that connection. If following your team becomes painful because they’re losing or they move or the owner says something terrible, they may lose you as a fan. That’s where Penn State is right now, and where it’s going to stay for a lot of people for the foreseeable future.
Do I get extra credit for that homework assignment?
What you say is generally not true. The top players in terms of fandom and merchandise sales are usually among the best players.
Can you point to a few examples where a team really suffered because of off the field antics? And I don’t mean just bad PR. Please give me 3 situations where either teams or individuals, who were still good, suffered for any extended period of time due to off the field issues? Even if you can find 3, there are far more example of there being no effect, or even in some cases increased popularity.
Sorry, but this isn’t the case. The large majority of scholarship football players at top-50 programs absolutely do think they’re potential NFL material. It’s one of the biggest parts of any big-time school’s recruiting pitch. And in point of fact, most of them are potential NFL material, depending on how their bodies and skills develop. In most cases they wind up not making it, of course, but 17 year old jocks are not known for sober assessments of their limitations or careful consideration of the potential vicissitudes of life.
If they were “just there to play football” with no ambitions beyond that, they’d be going to low-profile school where they’d get on the field faster, not to a Big 10 school.
That’s true, but it has no connection to what I said.
So I should locate some examples so you can ignore them because you know there are more counterexamples? I’ll pass.
Do you have a cite for that? There are certainly plenty of NFL hopefuls at the big programs, but I’m skeptical that it’s anything like a majority at 50 schools.
You are incorrect. For most universities, the sports programs are a net drain on the general fund (as proven by the NCAA’s own reports). For Penn State, the sports program is a net positive to the general fund (as proven by the fact the Athletic Department takes no money from the general fund, and pays in full price for their athlete’s scholarships).
Marley, thanks for merging my OP from GD. Silly me, but I thought this would be a contentious topic, turning into a debate with some heated exchanges. I don’t know WHAT I was thinking!
With that said, in regards to your post:
I spoke to a good friendmof mine who is tied into the PSU Community fairly well. He doesn’t claim to be an expert, and I’m not putting hi out there as one. However, I asked him if this has cost PS any recruits. He thought maybe one or two, but no one of real significance. his theory for this is that the new head coach is some guy from the Patriots, and kids want to play for him.
I find this dubious, and I’m hoping someone That knows more about this to speak to this. My personal guess is that kids and their parents are weighing options, and waiting for the NCAA to permit a transfer without the year penalty. If kids are permitted to leave and play right away at another Div. 1 school, I predict a mass exodus of players from PS. I don’t care if Bill Belichek came to coach. Kids will want to leave.
The shutting down of this program is the only action that can help begin the healing. I think having this scab opened every week during the college football season is not going to work, and any school that plays penn st. Will not want to be a part of the circus to follow.
And what if some how PSU gets into the bowl picture? What then? I know this is unlikely, but stranger things have happened. No, there are nothing but negatives to continue the football program.
There will be people hurt by the shutdown for sure, but I think these people cannot be compared to the tragedy that is the PSU cover up.
Like many large schools, football at PSU on Saturday is an event, with tailgating and partying. My friend, for one, doesnt like the idea of giving this up. It never ceases to amaze me how people can get tunnel vision to just focus on what’s important to them, and not the bigger picture of what’s going on around them. People who believe that the football program wasn’t THE enabler for Sandusky’s actions are kidding themselves. It must go. It HAS to go.
What should it turn into? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think that’s important right now. SMU was able to put things into perspective and reorganize. It took them about 30 years, but that’s about right.
I am sick of decisions being made because of money. The coverup was because of money. Keeping Penn St. a viable program will boil down to money. Networks will want to broadcast from Happy Valley because of the ratings ( I’m looking at you, ESPN). Football is a religion in Central PA, and as long as the dollars keep flowing in every fall (and assuming you are not connected in any way to a victim), you’ll want things to go back to normal.
That means selling food, beer, t-shirts and hats, and anything else a PSU logo can be stamped.
OK. here it is. If PSU is permitted to field a football team, those blank uniforms will have to get a bit of color. How about a Scarlet Letter “A” (for “abuse”) on both sides of the helmet, or the blue child abuse logo on each side?
It makes me ill knowing that PSU has not been hammered by the NCAA, Big Ten, or even a strong group of alumni. It’s time to take a stand. If one of your children were one of Sandusky’s victims, what would you want to see happen?
And they might want to play for O’Brien. But a lot of these players made their decisions before the newest revelations. I just think playing for PSU is going to be much less appealing for kids who are in high school now and in the years to come. The things that built the football program are gone, and it’s not like Notre Dame in that its advantages faded with time, it’s that the program is disgraced, and to the extent the team was associated with just one guy, he, too, is deeply tied to these crimes. So who knows. I’m not predicting that everybody will leave (unless the NCAA bans the team). I’m saying they’re going to have a lot more trouble getting recruits and making money than they used to.
Let’s make a friendly wager then. I predict, assuming their team is still a top 20-ish team this year, I predict they will still have a top 20-ish ranked recruiting class in 2014. What do you say to that bet?
If by “extra” you mean “any,” and if “credit” is short for “credibility,” then I can’t make any promises, but it’d be a start.
You argued that sports is integral to PSU’s mission; when I categorically showed you your error, citing their actual sports-lacking mission, you called me a naive fool for believing that their explicitly-stated, official mission was their actual mission.
In order to make that conspiracy-theory (and I use the term deliberately, as you’re suggesting a group of government employees is deliberately misleading the public about their activities) argument remotely persuasive, the first step would be to tell us what the actual mission of PSU is–you know, the one you claim they have that includes sports as an integral component.
If this is one of those “The Truth is Out There, Man!” things where the mystery never gets resolved through the course of the series, that’s cool too. Just tell us up-front that, yes, sports is integral to PSU’s mission, but no, their mission statement doesn’t describe their true mission, and no, we’re not allowed to know what that true mission is.
Aren’t you clever! Such sharp wit, I really don’t know how to respond.
You did no such thing. You linked to a mission statement, which like most mission statements, is standard boilerplate. It has little to do with how the school is actually run. You know that, but you decide you would rather ignore reality, once again, in order to substitute you own perverse understanding where sports programs that support thousands of people are just “games”. You can trot out your mission statement all you want. It’s a distraction. The question was whether you would eliminate an academic dept under similar circumstances. You gave so weak-ass reply about how it diminishes the university, so presumably, you wouldn’t eliminate one. That’s where the dissonance becomes clear. You want the punish the football program for being too powerful. As if their power represent some moral hazard despite there being clear circumstances where the program could rightfully be shut down. There is a clear system of checks and balances, and accountability wrt to on-field product. Yet, your hesitance to give the death penalty to an academic dept. under similar circumstances basically means they are held to wildly different standards.
Seeing as you are the only person who doesn’t get it, I don’t think any about of discussion will help you. If you cannot see that:
Mission statements are usually vague goals most companies do not spend a great deal of time explicitly trying to ONLY those goals.
If your allocate your resources in ways that go against your mission, your mission statement is not where you priorities and values lie.
A mission statement is not an exhaustive list of everything a company or institutions wants to accomplish or seeks to do.
Go look up the mission statement for the Boy Scouts. Does it say anything about banning gays? Does Google’s mission statement say anything about supporting gay marriage? No, because that’s not what mission statements do. Yet, somehow you think going to Google and saying, hey, gay marriage avocation is not in your mission statement, so you shouldn’t be doing that, that they would act as though making a coherent, logical argument.
Not allowed? Any amount of common sense would let know where their priorities lie. If you think sports are not part of a school like Penn State or USC, or Alabama’s actual mission, then maybe you should write your congressman asking why they pay their coaches more than just about every other state employee.
It’s odd that you’d say that, considering that football had (once again) essentially nothing to do with the coverup. It’s the same kind of coverup that happens anywhere you have old rich fuckers who are friends, and it did not benefit the football team in any meaningful way.
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As an aside, to the two dumbshit students I saw with a tent and spotlight “defending” the Paterno statue on my drive to work today: If PSU gets unreasonable/unjustifiable institutional sanctions, it will be because morons like you are newsworthy and are what people are seeing of the institutional reaction. Please stop being stupid.
I’m starting to wonder what experience you have with mission statements. My experience with small nonprofits setting them is that it’s an arduous process by which leaders try to bring together the central reason for an organization’s existence and set up the mission in order to guide future organizational behavior. Perhaps that’s not your experience, but this brings me back to the question of what, exactly, you think PSU’s real mission is. You’ve still not told us.
Absolutely: an academic institution’s academic departments are held to wildly different standards from an academic institution’s recreational departments. The idea that there’s anything wrong with that is peculiar, to say the least. [edit: my “absolutely” doesn’t mean I agree with the silly paraphrase of my argument that I want to punish them for being too powerful, a paraphrase that ignores some small tiny detail of the case, what was it? oh yeah, RAPING CHILDREN)
This is another good place to ask for a cite. What say you, folks: am I the only one who finds this line of reasoning on brickbacon’s part peculiar, or are there others out there who, in his words, don’t “get it”?
Jerry Sandusky is going to prison for the rest of his life.
Joe Paterno is dead.
Curley and Schultz are under indictment for perjury, and have lost their jobs
Spanier is no longer President of Penn State, and may yet be indicted and prosecuted.
Penn State is going to be shelling out tens of millions of dollars in civil lawsuit settlemnts.
ASSUMING that Curley and Schultz do some jail time, and ASSUMING that all victims receive a large amount of money, and KNOWING that none of the guilty parties kept their jobs… what would be the point of the NCAA imposing any further penalties? What can the NCAA do to the guilty parties? Nothing!
I can understand saying “It’s regrettable that some innocent people have to suffer, but it’s NECESSARY if we’re going to punish the guilty.”
But in this case, the guilty are ALREADY getting their punishments via the criminal justice system. WHAT guilty persons would be punished by NCAA sanctions?
Giving Penn State the “death penalty” would punish ONLY people who weren’t involved in the scandal at all.
The NCAA simply CAN’T punish Sandusky, Paterno, Curley, Schultz or Spanier any further. So, imposing the death penalty would do NOTHING except make a few people feel as if SOMETHING was done.
The Board of Trustees, who were seriously negligent in their oversight of the institution, not that that makes them particularly different from most other such boards or rich entitled fucks.
And that exactly why they need to do it. Doing nothing about it sends the message that you are complicit in what happened. And, in my opinion, flat out means that. People who have ethical problems with something do something to try and prevent it. Many people claim to find things immoral, but then just turn a blind eye when it happens. Those people don’t really have a moral problem with it–they just say so to look good.
In fact, I believe that’s why people want Penn State to be punished.
What do you think would be a fair metric? You implied that had the recruits know about the Freeh report, they would not have come. Next year’s class will certainly know about it, so why would you not expect a backlash?
In short, their budget is their mission statement. Regardless, a mission statement is not an exhaustive list of all of an organization’s goals and aims. Read any mission statement from any large organization. They ALL do several things not specifically enumerated in their mission statement. All of which is irrelevant to the initial point. Engineering is not specifically stated in their mission statement. Your contention was that it was essential to their mission. The statement itself does not bare that out. There is no singular academic dept. that has an inviolable right to exist. If you think the conduct in this case was so egregious as to eliminate the football program, then it should be enough to to it to any program.
So you are saying an academic dept. can facilitate child rape with no threat of the death penalty?
How much money do you think the team made in the last 11 to 14 years? The athletic department seems to turn an annual profit of more than $10 million and most of that has to come from football. Do you think it might’ve been less if they’d had to deal with the fallout from this scandal and do you think their on-field performance (which affects the money) had suffered? It seems obvious that Penn State leadership thought that might happen.
I do. I also think we’re talking about a longer term problem and not just 2014.
Justice serves at least two functions, but you’re only thinking about one–vengeance against the guilty. The other function is deterrence.
In the future, there’s going to be an analogous circumstance: a coach, a bunch of administrators, the head of a college will find out about a terrible crime committed by someone high up in the sports program. They’ll make a decision: do I cover this crime up in order to protect the program, even at personal risk, or do I report it to the authorities and risk the program’s reputation?
If PSU gets to continue having a football program, that future coach/etc. will factor that into the decision. Likewise, if the decision to cover up the crime results in the elimination of the program, the future coach will factor that into the decision.
Do you agree that the death penalty (which is a crazy melodramatic term–it should be called the “can’t run around with a ball with other colleges penalty”) would have a deterrent effect on future people who consider covering up a crime in order to protect a program?
Because I think that’s pretty important. And yes, some innocent people will suffer–innocent people who, incidentally, benefited indirectly (and unknowingly) from allowing a rapist to continue raping. Any decision will result in innocent people suffering. I’m less concerned with the small business owner, who will need to find a new business model, and more concerned with the child, who will need to find something else to do than get raped by an adult.
