The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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No Way!

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Zayd Issah won’t be playing for the Nittany Lions. The vaunted recruit got his ass thrown in jail on Saturday as four cops were necessary to subdue the in-yo-face 6’4″ 200 lb linebacker. He has been charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, and having a personal stash of pot.

Recall that this is the same dude who was previously embroiled in a counterfeiting case that sort of put him on his best behavior if he wanted to come to Penn State. You know, like that Big Mac on which he spent the bogus bill was that important, right? Moron.

So, give the guy another chance and what does he do? Shows his true colors. He gets into a fight with some folks and then when a cop grabs him by the wrist, he goes nuclear. Two of the four cops sustained minor injuries. The pot find was incidental to the rest of the charges, discovered when they searched the thug.

Issah will get what he deserved. Bye, bye college career. No way the NFL would ever touch him, anyway. They don’t want another Aaron Hernandez running around making them look bad.

A bail hearing this morning allowed his parents to post $2,000 of the required $20,000 bond to get him out of the slammer, they did this with the help of bail bond service called Connecticut Bail Bonds Group and if they do, he’ll go home with them to H-burg. Issah had been in a probationary program for first-time offenders after the counterfeit fiasco. Now, the Dauphin County district attorney says he’ll file documents to remove the moron from the program, which means he’ll face felony charges for that past “mistake”.

Bill O’Brien stated that after Saturday’s incident, if the charges hold, the football program is no longer interested in Issah. I think that’s a foregone conclusion.

Deep Trouble for Stanley, Thomas

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The most telling thing in Joe Paterno’s press conference today was not what he said, but what he did not say on the subject of the players who were held back in State College while the team traveled to Iowa, to wit:

Q. Could you update us on the status of (Sean) Stanley and (Derrick) Thomas, two of the kids who didn’t play last week, didn’t make the trip? ????? ?????

COACH PATERNO: I’m not allowed to talk about that. We’ve been I’m telling you, we were told that we’re breaking the law if we talk about it.

If any kid is in any way not allowed to play for one reason or another, we have a long letter from the university administration not to discuss it.

But Joe is pretty open about players who have grade issues and the like. He wasn’t being completely truthful when he said “if a kid is in any way not allowed to play for one reason or another” [emphasis mine] he is not allowed to discuss it. For example, Brandon Ware was grounded in the doghouse last weekend as well, but Joe gave a specific reason:

Q. Is (Brandon) Ware in the same boat?

COACH PATERNO: Ware is in the same boat except I can say that Ware has had academic problems.

Q. Are you at the point where you’re about ready to give up on Ware? ????? ???? ????

COACH PATERNO: Well, until he does a better job academically. He’s here to get an education.

So, Ware is in the same boat, but with academic problems. This Turkey can conceive of only two reasons players would be remanded to that floating doghouse, the S. S. Shitouttaluck: grades and legal issues. Thus, it is reasonable to deduce that Thomas and Stanley are in deep legal doodoo.

Said doodoo can run the gamut of law-breaking, I suppose. I would have to believe that if they were arrested for any reason, it would be a matter of public record and word would have already gotten out through the local rags. You can’t keep that stuff quiet in State College. Even the Nittany Lion being arrested for public drunkenness was splashed all over the place the next day.

This one is really tight-assed, stone cold slammed shut. It must be something big. The decision to sit these guys didn’t come from Paterno, as it does when the matter is just bad grades. No arrest records have been unearthed. What the hell could it be?

In another obvious press conference omission, nobody asked Paterno about “the punt”. (For those who were getting laid during the Iowa game, I mean the decision to punt from the PSU 46 on 4th and 6 trailing 17-3 with less than five minutes remaining.)  Come on! This represents a serious abrogation of responsibility by the media. Did no one in the room or on the phone have the balls to ask Joe about the controversial call? Surely, it was one of the two dumbass sideline issues that stuck out in the Iowa game, the other being the timeout vs. spike at the end of the first half.  He did address that latter issue.

Q. I know you said after the game about the spike, taking three seconds, that seemed like it was a fast three seconds. But it looked like you initially wanted a timeout first. Could you review that?

COACH PATERNO: I wanted a timeout and the guy didn’t give it to me. He said because it was a penalty involved he said he didn’t think he wanted a timeout. I said, “what are you talking about, I told you I wanted a timeout.” I tried to call the timeout as soon as the ball was located. And they started the clock, the wrong guy started the clock. The guy that places the ball should start the clock.

You know, we’ll get the blame. But that’s fine. We handled it all right. We knew what we were doing. We got some other people that didn’t know what they were doing. And they’re not on our team.

Paterno also talked about the red zone issues without mentioning any specific names. ??? ????? ????? He (kinda) explains why coaches favor the run over the pass in the red zone.

Q. Joe, the problem in the red zone, couple of players said there’s problems, confusion getting plays down there. Have there been problems with your team getting plays down on the field or letting the clock run down?

COACH PATERNO: The clock ran down on Saturday. That was not I won’t get into whose fault that was. That certainly wasn’t one of the coach’s faults or our players. Again, I hate to point the finger to anybody, so we’ll leave that go.

But I don’t know whether that’s accurate. It may be. I don’t think so. I think part of our problem, again, is making some plays and we have to make them. And when you’re not running (the ball) as well as we’d like to run, the closer you get to the goal line, the tougher it is to throw.

They start…they don’t have to back up 30 yards. They squeeze you up and back on you. They play short stuff better. So it’s a combination of things. And I don’t mean to make excuses, because I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job in a lot of different ways.

But I think down on the goal line and in the red zone, we know what the problem is. The problem is we can’t just take it and knock people back, particularly against a couple of teams that particularly Iowa is you guys may not recognize it, Iowa, that was one tough football game, physically. It was a tough football game physically.

Iowa is one heck of a defensive football team, particularly against the run.

On to Illinois. Let’s put Iowa behind us.

Ganja Three (Minus One) Charged

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Well, ol’ Maurice Evans and Abe Koroma were charged today with a semi-inconsequential misdemeanor, possession of a small quantity of marijuana. So, all that folderol by the cops and we have what amounts to what a whole shitload of college students do, only they’re not high-profile athletes in a program that is currently under a microscope. This Turkey still thinks that Evans and Koroma need some significant punishment from Paterno, not because of the gravity of the offense, but because they’re so irresponsible to the team and themselves, and besides, they’re dumbasses.

I read apologists’ reports around the ‘net saying that boys will be boys, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Screw that! Again, we’re not talking about Joe Student here; we’re talking about—dare I say?—hired hands. Yeah, that’s right. The payoff might be in futures, not present dollars, but it’s there and these guys need to be subjected to closer scrutiny and held to higher standards than real students for that precise reason. I don’t buy the “boys will be boys” crapola. It’s like saying that if players want to break training by disregarding rules and coming in overweight, that should be acceptable, too. ?????? ?????? ??? Look, these guys are playing for an NFL farm team, and it isn’t even a dirty little secret that they’re not real students. They’re privileged to be playing for a springboard program that will give them the visibility they need to make those big bucks at “the next level.” So, they better give us what we expect or they won’t get that eventual reward, which it seems many of them think is their automatic birthright.

Of course, the NFL will handle its disciplinary issues its own way. These morons better get used to being scrutinized for their behavior now, because if and when they reach the NFL, they’ll be 1,000 times more visible, especially because they’ll buy some 4-carat diamond earrings and 25 pounds of bling to hang around their oversized necks. (Why do they need to have big necks and fancy helmets? They have no brains to support and protect. Must be to keep the bling hanger in good working condition.) The thing is, as I’ve mentioned before, crap like this knocks their position down in the draft and costs them money almost immediately at “the next level.” Yet they’re stupid enough to do it anyway.

We all saw what happened to Ed Johnson. The NFL took a chance on him. He had the notorious “character flag” on his scouting report and he was passed over in the draft. Indianapolis decided to take a chance on him as an unsigned free agent. They essentially put him on probation. In his second year, he got himself arrested and now he’s out of the NFL. Yeah, another dumbass. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!

Yeah, I understand. I’m already hearing ex-hippie potheads my age telling me that, “Like, man, smoking pot shouldn’t be a crime. Make love, not war. Fuck the draft.” All that 60s bullshit. Yeah, right. You know what? This ain’t Woodstock. It’s a business—a huge money business at that. I employ your ass, I make the rules. You don’t like my rules, you get the fuck out. If you want to stay, you play by my rules. I don’t give half a shit whether you think marijuana should be legalized. Screw your philosophical debates. These guys broke team rules and that has nothing to do with what should be legal and what shouldn’t be. If I hire your ass and I want to make a rule that says you wear red on Friday, then you better damn well wear red on Friday.

I’m just anticipating all the damn apologists. So sue my ass for rampant cynicism. ???? ??? ??????

Now, what would I recommend? I think that if these clowns are first-time offenders, which I believe them to be, they should be suspended for half the season—not just the cupcake part of the season. Make the rest of the team pay for their transgressions and send a very strong no tolerance message to those who would scoff at team rules in the future. They also should be told that the next offense will result in their expulsion from the program. Yeah, it’s harsh, but it doesn’t seem that people on this team have respect for the law and fear of the Lord. It might take them a while to realize that the effects of their stupid, ill-conceived actions will plague them long into the future, but somehow they need to start growing up. ???? ??????? Boys will be boys. Bullshit!

I don’t see Paterno keeping these guys out for the Illinois game and beyond. It will be interesting to see just how it goes.

I’m sick and tired of all this crap. I want Penn State to return to being a paragon of a program, the grand experiment, all that stuff. Alas, the program is as guilty as the players for succumbing to the pressure to have a football team that can play at the highest level. Coaches have to recruit brainless idiots who have no sense of proper decorum for an athlete representing a premier institution (ok, for a Land Grant school, anyway). So, the program is culpable from the President of the university on down. The fish stinks from the head.

If you don’t like the program being under a microscope where every little character flaw is exposed, tough shit. That’s the way it’s going to be, henceforth and forever. And stop the whining about Penn State getting more than its share of adverse publicity. That’s bullshit. It just always seems that way because you don’t read 114 newspapers every day about Colorado University—you read them about Penn State. Jeez! Quit your bitching and press for the punishments to keep coming down, and coming down heavy—just like the “No Fun League.” Fuck ’em—let’s clean this thing up!