Semi-OT: Penn State to change uniforms
After wearing names on the back of their uniforms since the Sandusky scandal, Penn State will go back to their traditional, nameless look. The names were placed on the jerseys in 2012 to show recognition for the kids who stayed/committed despite the tainted past.
http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/07/16/penn-state-football-removing-jersey-names
This seems to be causing quite a bit of debate. Personally, while it was a small gesture, I thought the names were a good symbol of a new era for Penn State. I understand the tradition arguement, but I would think PSU would want to get away from anything that could cause anymore public debate especially after the 409 wins were restored.
Since there was only one apparel thread thus far today, I figured I'd add another one to see what the board thought.
Side note: PSU's president, Eric Barron, was one of the advocates of the uniform change. Barron was the former president of FSU who resigned and took the PSU job due to the increased adversity due to the Jameis Winston rape scandal. Funny how some of these people just circulate.
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What is it with you people? You're touching each other's nipples, putting your balls in each other's mouths... I just don't understand your generation.
I was ready to see the Nike Pro Combat 3.0 PSU Roar jerseys or some craziness...you mean to tell me they're going back to something I rarely ever noticed they went FROM?
Sweet.
I feel cheated.
Whatever...we'll always have these:
"I would think PSU would want to get away from anything that could cause anymore public debate"
As compared to their football program, PSU don't care, man. Haven't cared from day one.
Have you heard that creep Franklin speak about how he feels about Penn State? He doesn't want a new era. He thinks Paterno's program was perfect.
So long as "Paterno's perfect program" includes losing to Michigan every season, that's fine with me.
Edit: speaking strictly in terms of football.
One of the best avatar/post combinations in the thread.
Great. Now they can go from looking like a d7 high school team that knows how to use a sewing machine to looking like a crappy team wearing practice uniforms.
It's Penn State's traditional look to not have the names, but in this day and age it probably hurts recruiting not having the name on the uni. Every kid wants his name out there.
In the eraly 70's, Michigan did not have names on the unis, but they did by the mid 70's. Anyone know what triggered the change?
Names first appeared during the 1977 Rose Bowl vs USC.
They appeared again during the 1979 Gator Bowl vs North Carolina.
The 1980 season was the first year they appeared permanently because the players voted on it.
I've heard names on bowl jersies only is a ND tradition so they could have an individualized memento of the season. I don't know how far back that dates or if it was an influence on Michigan or not.
I can't imagine no names. Bonus points for something out of the ordinary, like D. Robinson or Biakabutuka stretching from shoulder to shoulder, Robinson III, Hardaway Jr in basketball.
jerseys is good for TV. Watching games is more enjoyable for me when I know who the players on the other teams are. Makes it easier for the announcers too.
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Penn State, more than anyone else, does not want a "look at me" culture, if you know what I mean.
Because, you know, looking at what they do is actually a crime.
really hurt Bama's recruiting though has it?
How about if they put a picture of sandusky and joepa on one side of the helmet and on the other side the words "Which way to the showers?"
Fuck penn state and their delusional joepa loving fans!
Too much to fit on a helmet, too busy even with hydrographics.
Gotta put that on a student t-shirt, which would undoubtedly sell out quickly in State College.
Maryland is all "LOL" on your "too busy" comment.
IIRC BOB wanted the names to honor the kids who "stuck with" PSU after the scandal. They should have all graduated by now...
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not only hid a pervert to protect football, but fail to see they did anything wrong, insisting they and their beloved Joepa are the victims.
^ This * 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Wake up @theglove
Penn State is the extreme example of how fanaticism and demagoguery in college sports can become very, very ugly.
The lesson that we as fans should all take away from this is to not delude ourselves into thinking that what happened at Penn State could never happen here. We were fortunate to have a man of Bo Schembechler's quality leading our football program for 20 years. A man who put the good of the program and the University ahead of his own personal needs and goals and walked away when the time was right.
Paterno seems to have been the opposite, a coach who ultimately held on too long in pursuit of a goal and letting the pursuit of the goal outweigh any other consideration. The fan culture of Penn State enabled Joe Paterno's single-minded pursuit, nurtured it, with disasterous results.
We should be ever-vigilant against placing our athletic leaders on a pedestal so high that they can't be knocked down. Penn State as an institution and a fanbase is guility of that and it's why they can never back off the narrative that Joe Paterno is a blameless victim as opposed to a complicit participant in the whole Sandusky affair. This is why Penn State has earned my eternal scorn.
Every college sports fanbase should take note of what can happen when you invest too much devotion into any one person, because that devotion should always be conditional and not based upon how many football games that coach won or where he rates all-time amongst his peers.
with most of what you said, but I don't think Joe Pa held on too long as much as I think they held onto him too long. By the time the Sandusky incident came to light, Paterno was a old-OLD sick man with what appeared to be pretty serious dementia and possibly Alzheimers. I don't think he is blameless, I think he bears some limited responsibility for not personally taking it public when the disclosures he made were not followed up on with or by law enforcement.
However, I would have liked to hear his side of the story and by the time he was called upon to tell it he literally did not have the faculties to do so. I do not think it is out of the realm of possibility that the investigation was strategically timed and pursued when Paterno's health deteriorated to the extent that it did in order for him to bear the brunt of the blame before and after his death when his failures were of an order far less than the University President, the Athletic Department, local police, State Police, and possibly even the FBI. An immediate investigation and arrest of Sandusky after the first reports would not have caused extensive damage to the Penn State brand and would have bolstered Paterno's legacy as a person who protects kids. He had very little, and possibly nothing at all, to gain from the charges not being brought against Sandusky immediately.
The intensity of the anger toward Paterno is not at all surprising but is largely a cop-out. The Sandusky saga was a law enforcement failure at its core having very little to do with Joe Paterno. His role in the entire incident was covered in about a grand total of 10 minutes of Grand Jury testimony. He was never charged with anything and could not have been.
I agree that when the facts of the Sandusky affair finally came to the public's attention, Paterno was in no condition to address them. However, this all came to light some 10 years after the events in question took place and I would argue that Joe was more than competent to deal with things at the time they were brought to his attention. I also think it's relevant to note that at the time of the events in question, Joe was locked in a tight race with Bobby Bowden over who would top the list of all-time wins in Div 1A, and I do think that the pursuit of this goal influenced his decision-making in dealing with the Sandusky affair.
That said, I don't mean to imply that any of this makes Joe criminally liable for what Jerry Sandusky did. Joe was not an accomplice in these acts, but I do think he's guilty of participating in keeping things hushed up. Would he deserve jail time for something like that? No. Does he deserve to have his legacy tarnished because of it? Absolutely. I think Joe Paterno choose to protect the image of his football program and his own legacy over ensuring justice being served for those young men victimized by Jerry Sandusky.
The Penn State faithful's ongoing attempt to whitewash this fact by shifting blame to Graham Spanier and Tim Curley is infuriating. The school president and the AD certainly bear some of the shame, but Paterno was the face of Penn State athletics and he had to power to see this thing handled correctly. Is that fair? Maybe not, but if you want to be a legend, that comes with some responsibility.
hole in your (otherwise very well-reasoned) response. What Sandusky did had nothing to do with the football team and there is, and has never been, any allegation that any of Sandusky's acts were committed on football players. Would there have been some "cross-over" impact on the football program due to the fact that a former coach participated in these acts, sometimes using football facilities? Probably, but not a lasting one. Nothing that Sandusky allegedly did was intrinsically related to the football team. In this sense, I think it is a huge jump, a bigger jump than most people seem to see, that Paterno would have made the logical determination that hushing the story would have had a positive effect on the football program. The story coming to light would not have resulted in any sanctions against Penn State, no competive advantage was gained, Sandusky would have been arrested, and it would not even really have been a "Penn State event," it would have been a "Sandusky event." I think that is the weak point in your interpretation of the events.
1) Paterno didn't know where or how far an investigation would have led. Nor how long it would last. It's not reasonable to assume that a fiftysome year old man who had been at PSU his entire adult life was only involved in the one reported incident there. That's giving Paterno a perhaps undeserved benefit of the doubt regarding his own knowledge of Sandusky's behavior.
2) It's wrong to say that because no sanctions would have resulted, that keeping the story hidden gave no competitive advantage to PSU. We have to consider the competitive advantage gained by keeping the story quiet vs having it go public. Obviously, PSU didn't gain anything by Sandusk'y criminal behavior. Paterno and PSU pushed an image of doing things the right way, to the point of trumpeting their moral superiority over other programs. These revelations could cause the program more damage than one with a different reputation. Plus there's plenty of evidence that damage can be done without any sanctions. Michigan basketball suffered for years before the NCAA penalties. And those probably never happen without Ed Martin's criminal case.
3) I don't think it's right to look at protecting Sandusky as a decision that was made once, when McQueary reported him. Every day that passed was another opportunity to stop him. He was still around. He was still running his charity that gave him access to young boys and they all knew it. The problem was that the longer they waited to do the right thing, the higher the cost, since they and the football program were going to take heat for waiting. So, while they might not have risked that much by reporting him initially, that no longer held true years down the line. I never believed it was about protecting Sandusky, it was about protecting the program.
keeping a serial child rapist close to your program "before, during, and after he is caught" is going to have a negative affect on your football program, as it did. Finding out that a former member of your coaching staff is abusing children, turning him in, and that person being arrested and charged would have very little effect on your football program as it had nothing to do with the football team. So, why would a person knowingly choose to do a very difficult thing that would almost certainly cause immense damage to a football program he is trying to protect when he could do a very easy thing that would cause very little damage to the program?
I don't have the answer to that question, but it is a valid question. Your "right hand man" comment could have possibly help to answer it if Sandusky and Paterno remained close at the time but has been widely reported that Paterno and Sandusky were at odds to the point of not speaking to each other as early as 1997.
It is my personal opinion that Joe Paterno is guilty of failing to attempt to obtain additional information that could have shed light on something he was made aware of but unclear about. I don't say so to minimize the impact that his omission could have had in the overall scheme of events. But Sandusky was investigated by law enforcement not once but twice in 1998 and 2002 and nothing at all was done. To my knowledge Paterno was not granted special investigator priveleges for those investigations nor did he have a say in those charging decisions. I have been forced into being a Joe Pa apologist because people actually lump Paterno in with Sandusky, they treat them as one in the same, and that is completely ridiculous.
....re the failure of other people and organizations to do their job. However, I believe that Paterno's failure to personally pursue the Sandusky affair was by far the most damaging ommission. He could, and should, have seen that the matter was fully investigated and legally brought to closure. All he had to do was follow-up with those people and organizations, and he had years and months to do so. So it wasn't a simple "mistake". That can't be forgiven, in my opinion.
I was a long-time admirer of Paterno and Penn State. It is a tragedy that Paterno bears the primary responsibility for not seeing that justice was carried out. That inaction tore down much of the brickwork that he had laid in helping to build a very good and respected university. I am still rooting for PSU to do something positive and meaningful to help make up for his failings.
The narrative in JUB's book, Fourth and Long, obliquely (and probably unintentionally) demonstrates just how Penn State's fans are (and have been) taken in by the JoePa mythology.
The fairy tale created and advanced by JoePa himself (and which persists in no small measure due to the continuing efforts of his family, alumni and others with a lot at stake) tells the story of this simple kid with humble roots who, against all odds, turned the Nittany Lions into a national powerhouse and the university into a world class institution while eternally remaining the same old guy who reached the pinnacle of success despite all the odds. He could not, you see, have ever known about what Sandusky did because, gosh darn it, he was just not worldly enough to be able to get his mind wrapped around such evildoing.
JoePa is a graduate of (Ivy League) Brown University. "Simpleton", my ass. The only deluded fools in this story are people who continue to believe the bullshit.