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Football season cometh.

Which conference will have the National Champion?


  • Total voters
    87

nittany03

Recovering NFO. Herder of Programmers.
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Are we seriously going to go round and round on this again?

At this point I don't know who to believe. We have one line brought forward by an insurance company to avoid paying a settlement which references testimony that can't be examined or refuted. We have a story where the sole named source has allegedly been convicted of two counts of harassment, and is alleged to be a serial harasser of the Paterno family. The shit that's come out recently is not exactly unimpeachable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. I get that. But the allegations are not open and shut. They're just lobbing another grenade into the shitstorm. There's another one out there saying six assistant coaches allegedly saw things, but doesn't say who they are, and at least one alleged source is flat-out calling the story untrue. Who to believe? No one's bringing enough evidence to the table; they're all just slinging shit. I'm not going to defend Paterno if this whole thing is true, because the allegations are disgusting and indefensible. If anyone aided and abetted Sandusky, hang 'em. But bring a Goddamned airtight case first, in a court or in some freaking shoe-leather reporting. Don't just stir up a damned lynch mob.

I still believe certain people want to view people like me as somehow different and obsessed with football to the point of being morally bent, and OK with what happened. That's still utter shit, with the exception of freaks like John Ziegler. Penn State's alumni and fanbase are no different than any other large D-1 state school's. I believe down to my shoelaces that people are and were using this "football culture" crap to avoid examining the fact that this, like other kinds of sexual assault, is a societal problem. It gets screwed up over and over again, because the people that get away with it do so by manipulating people. I do not owe you an apology for this. This holds true regardless of who did or did not try to sweep anything under the rug in State College.

My initial read was that Paterno had good intentions and fucked up. I won't apologize for trying to make a judgement by looking past the Internet torches and pitchforks and trying to see what actually happened. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn't, though. At this point, I don't know. Hopefully we'll see sooner rather than later, because I'm sick of this shit. And I'm sick of people like you rubbing my face in it.

Edit: Doctor Barron, the President of the University, puts it in much better terms than me dashing off an Internet post. His last sentence says it all.
 
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Recovering LSO

Suck Less
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And I'm sick of people like you rubbing my face in it.
Maybe those are considerations that should have been made before making some of your previous posts on the subject with comments (paraphrased) in line with, well, yeah, it's bad, but this misses the larger societal problem. In essence, stop looking over here and start looking there, there, and there.

It's not the fact that it happened that makes people ill. It's the reaction from more than just the "freaks" like Ziegler that turns stomachs.
 

nittany03

Recovering NFO. Herder of Programmers.
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Maybe those are considerations that should have been made before making some of your previous posts on the subject with comments (paraphrased) in line with, well, yeah, it's bad, but this misses the larger societal problem. In essence, stop looking over here and start looking there, there, and there.
That was not at all my intent, ever. I never wanted people to "stop looking over here." There's plenty that needs to be sorted over here, and I have never intended to imply that there wasn't. There's a reason Curley, Spanier, and Schultz stand indicted. But we should sort that out like civilized people with courts, not through Internet lynch mobs. The gravity of what happened makes it that more important to do it right.

What blows me up is when I feel people are using the "Penn State culture" excuse to say "it couldn't happen here." Because it could. That is what I mean by "it's a societal problem." I've been told that if you know five people, statistically one of them was abused. Don't know how accurate that is, but it's too freaking high. Sandusky was at this for decades. He adopted five kids, one of whom now accuses Sandusky of molesting him. But he had to pull the wool over the eyes of the whole Child and Youth Services apparatus to do that. Multiple times. His charity had a child psychologist on staff. They worked with multiple foster parents who know how to look for signs of abuse.

And on and on. Many of the people that get away with this are damned good at hiding the sick shit they do. And I really fear that collectively we as a society run the risk of putting our head in the sand and saying "it only happened because Joe Paterno and Penn State let it happen." Well, there's some serious questions that need to get answered about Joe Paterno and Penn State's role in what happened. And they'll get answered in time. But they need to be answered correctly and thoroughly. That's happening. It's not done yet.

But in the meantime, we as a society need to have a more open dialogue about what these people look like and how to stop them. "Penn State football culture" is a convenient way not to have that discussion by blaming other people. Again, my intent with that argument is not to say "nothing to see here, move along." My intent is for more people to say "holy shit, if it could happen at Penn State, it could happen anywhere." Because it could, and it's orders of magnitude more important than who wins a football game.
 
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nittany03

Recovering NFO. Herder of Programmers.
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On a lighter note, anybody want to debate this. I obviously disagree with the selection of Clemson ahead of Carolina's "2001" entrance - then again, I really like Wagner. Kudos to VA Tech - Enter Sandman is pretty cool.
I've gotta give props to VA Tech. Yeah, you can bust on them and say that a song from 1980s hasn't been around long enough to be a college football tradition. The other way I've seen them use it is to pump up the crowd during the timeout before a key play at the end of the game. Kind of the reverse of how we use Zombie Nation, which generally gets dialed up in Beaver Stadium after a "holy shit, that just happened" highlight-reel play for the home team.

Other than my own school . . .
- It may get me mercilessly razzed among PSU fans, but I'm always a fan of OSU's band; had a few band geek high school classmates and friends of mine don the Scarlet and Gray for TBDBITL. Really wish our Blue Band would get rid of the damn woodwinds; they're a participation trophy instrument that no one can hear.
- Another recent tradition. "Jump Around" at Wisconsin, because why not?
Why watch the NFL when college is so much better???
If they played on the same day, I wouldn't be caught dead watching the NFL. Then again, I'm a Browns fan, so that's it's own level of Kafkaesque pain.
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
America's original game - baseball. Wednesday night is the deciding game of the College World Series. Big time Arizona is facing tiny Coastal Carolina (formerly USC-Coastal) of Myrtle Beach, SC.

Go Chants!
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
America's original game - baseball. Wednesday night is the deciding game of the College World Series. Big time Arizona is facing tiny Coastal Carolina (formerly USC-Coastal) of Myrtle Beach, SC.

Go Chants!
I used to love cutting class to watch a bunch of no name college ball players like Jason Varitek, Nomar Garciaparra, and Mark Texiera play ball.
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
I used to love cutting class to watch a bunch of no name college ball players like Jason Varitek, Nomar Garciaparra, and Mark Texiera play ball.

My catcher at Coastal was Kirt Manwaring who went on to win a gold glove with the Giants. When he threw it back from a crouch behind the plate harder than I threw it from the mound, I started looking for another career. Goodbye baseball, hello naval aviation...
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
What a weekend coming up:

#2 Clemson at Auburn,
#5 LSU at Wisconsin,
#3 Oklahoma at #15 Houston,
#16 UCLA at Texas A&M,
#18 Georgia at #22 North Carolina,
#10 Notre Dame at Texas
#11 Ole Miss neutral field vs #4 Florida State
#1 Alabama neutral field vs #20 Southern Cal

Can't ever remember an opening weekend so good. Are you ready for some football?! Wait a minute, that's a NFL phrase and they are still arguing about the national anthem. The Hanson Brothers have it correct.

 

DanMa1156

Is it baseball season yet?
pilot
Contributor
On a lighter note, anybody want to debate this. I obviously disagree with the selection of Clemson ahead of Carolina's "2001" entrance. Kudos to VA Tech - Enter Sandman is pretty cool.

http://www.realclearsports.com/lists/college_football_entrances/texas_aandm_entrance.html?state=stop

Why watch the NFL when college is so much better???
That was cool. Didn't know a lot of those. Never knew TN did that T - that was pretty neat. VA Tech - same thing - didn't know the Enter Sandman Entrance - that was neat.

I went to an Ohio State game once and was really impressed there, though I also got do do a UT at Texas A&M game at Kyle Field - and the camaraderie of the A&M fans was unlike anything I had seen. Kyle Field was really neat.
 

DesertRooster

The King of Nothing
chi-generic-images-notre-dame.jpg

To be fair though getting 6 players arrested before the start of the season probaly wasn't the best way to start off
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
Fugly weekend for the SEC so far. Mississippi State loses to South Alabama. Tennessee has to have overtime to escape Appalachian State after ASU misses an extra point. Missouri loses to WVU. South Carolina had to have a 55 yard field goal with less than a minute to beat Vandy. Arkansas currently tied with LA Tech. LSU down at halftime to Wisconsin.

Saw that the Oregon Ducks are starting four - that is 4 - redshirt freshmen offensive lineman today.
 
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