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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Sudden Impact: Rumours

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I know you’re hopin’ to find someone who’s gonna give you peace of mind.

When times go bad, when times get rough, won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.

I’m just second-hand news, I’m just second-hand newsssssssssss…

Fleetwood Mac sang “Second Hand News” back in 1977, even before Penn State met Alabama head-on at the goal line in that fateful 14-7 Sugar Bowl loss back in our callow days of Nittany Lion innocence when Sandusky was the name of a coach, not a scandal, and, hell, before some of you young whippersnappers were even born. The album was “Rumours,” which quickly went platinum, having been carried by Stevie Nicks’ mournful croaking of the hauntingly overplayed “Dreams.”

So much for my career as a musical historian—I’ll keep my crystal visions to myself. Therefore, let us abruptly shuck our reveries of mystical musical “rumours” and segue to Penn State’s notorious Board of Trustees. The subject of today’s Sudden Impact is rumors, spelled the American way, with heartfelt Turkey thanks to Noah Webster for removing the unnecessary “U”.

Tuning into Twitter, the Internet’s version of “Can You Top This?”, one encounters a surfeit of Penn State rumors. This week’s potential activities seem to be at the temporal focal point of speculation connected to the much maligned (deservedly) BoT. Well, hell, everything Penn State does or has had done to it involves the BoT either directly or indirectly. Accordingly, the fact that those university overseers are holding an open meeting this weekend has generated a maelstrom of speculation about the reasoning behind and the timing of the meeting.

The Star Trekkian term “damage control” entered into the Tweetsteria at some point. Yeah, the board has done lots of PR damage by being a bunch of putzes (and Peetzes) with respect to accepting the flawed Freeh report and scurrying on with a laser focus on the future. Coherent light beams aside, the board seems to want to publicly present the impression that it is open to governance changes and suggestions. Naturally, Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship (PS4RS) has a keen interest in any forum that is even ostensibly poised to meet the challenge of improving oversight; thus, PS4RS is coordinating representation at the public sessions, to wit:

The BoT will be holding a retreat this weekend that will include public sessions. Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship (PS4RS) is currently looking for alumni, students and friends of Penn State interested in attending the August 25 & 26 Board of Trustees Public Meeting. It is very important that the Penn State community remain engaged in the dealings of the Board of Trustees to reinforce our position as stakeholders of our University.

The August meeting will be held over two days in Room 207 at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, University Park, Pennsylvania. Public session meeting times are listed below. Please note times may adjust slightly.

Saturday, August 25 – 3:45 pm until 5 pm

Sunday, August 26 – 9 am until 2 pm

The agenda: http://www.psu.edu/trustees/agenda/scheduleaugust2012.html 

PS4RS is looking to have a delegation of members attend the meeting. Dress is recommended to be what you would wear to a business meeting.

Please fill in the survey below so our event coordinators can contact prior to the meeting.

REGISTER TO ATTEND THE MEETING

Now, back to the Tweetanoid rumors.

One rumor that is at least partially based on fact is that former president Graham Spanier will spill the beans from his perspective, perhaps via ESPN, during this week. He and his lawyers have been hinting at a press conference for a couple of weeks now. Tweeps are saying that it will happen this week, and that the board is quaking in its boots. Ooh, baby, baby, Spanier has big connections and knows what’s going on in everyone’s closet! He can bring down some big-ass trustees with one stroke of his mighty mouth, er pen, or whatever. OMG heads will roll! So goes the thinking of the Titans of Twitterbole, anyway. More likely, Spanier is planning the presser just to cover his own ass, as he has avoided criminal charges thus far but is certainly not immune from indictment. Give us your best shrug, Graham baby!

Another rumor is that the Clery Act investigation being conducted by the US Department of Education will come to a head this week, and OMG heads will roll. Let me not be too facetious here, as this one has credence, at least with respect to the potential that Penn State will take a serious hit from the investigation’s findings. In the worst case, PSU could incur a large fine, in addition to the possibility of losing federal grant money, student aid, and loans. So, yeah, it’s a big deal, and while much of the Freeh report can be disputed, there is enough good data in it to leave little doubt that Penn State was seriously out of compliance with the law. (We won’t debate the merit of the onerous record keeping and statistics generation required by the law, which is bureaucratic overkill typical of reactionary legislation. Suffice to say that it is the law.) The Executive Branch of the sitting administration in Washington seems to recognize no boundaries, and with a presidential election right around the corner, Penn State’s dirty laundry makes it the perfect target for yet another grandstand play. The dubiously good news is that the maximum fine levied thus far for violations of the Clery Act has been $350,000, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the $60 million assessed against PSU by the NCAA. However, that amount is chump change compared to what loss of Federal grant funding would cost Penn State. Furthermore, for political reasons I’ve already stated, Penn State is likely to break the record for fines, just to add insult to injury. On this one, be afraid! Be very afraid! The phone calls are coming from inside the apartment!

Of course, we’ve already covered the accreditation warning by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which stated that Penn State’s accreditation was “in jeopardy.” We attributed this slack-jawed quasi-threat to a vortex generated by a liberal interpretation of the Freeh report and the validation provided by the NCAA’s sanctimonious sanctions, stirred by the ubiquitous, vindictive Vicky Triponey’s input to her new boss, who just happens to be chair of the accreditation committee. Yeah, sure, we here at the Turkey have been known to start a rumor or two ourselves! While the Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t think there’s much danger here, the coupling of loss of accreditation with loss of Federal funds would be absolutely devastating.

Other rumors swirl around The Second Mile’s connections with highly placed Pennsylvania politicians. There is probably lots of dirt to be dug up following the money there. In some cases, though, Tweepsters are giving the governor a free ride by misdirecting their vitriol toward social welfare agencies and police departments when they should be setting their sights higher. Follow the money! This Turkey sees the faint glimmer of the 24K real stuff among the plethora of fool’s gold nuggets — big-time politics is a dirty game, one dirty hand washes the other, and so on, and so on. On the surface, we see a mutual protection society composed of Governor Tom Corbett, the board of trustees, and Rod Erickson. Let the digging commence. Much as Joe Paterno’s denouement served as a smokescreen for the board of trustees’ culpability, so could the Penn State situation in its entirety be a big diversion from a major statewide scandal.

That does it for rumors. Sometimes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Other times, the smoke and mirrors send you way astray of the mark. Trust your intellect and judgment to separate the worthy ones from the pure folly. And keep on Tweetin’.

******

Joe Posnanski’s biography of Joe Paterno is available today. This Turkey has a copy and will begin reading it forthwith. Advance copies were given to the media, so there are plenty of reviews out there. Among them:

******

I’ve bloviated incessantly, so let me now cess with a touch of ironic humor from Jeff Byers of StateCollege.com, who reports that Penn State will be revamping its hygiene policies, enjoining shower-taking on campus.

 

Have you any dreams you’d like to sell? Try eBay. I ain’t buying.

“Paterno” review by the New York Times

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Joe Posnanski’s much anticipated, yet ill-timed, biography of former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, simply entitled “Paterno,” will be released tomorrow, with advance copies already having been distributed to the media. Today, the New York Times published its review, written by Dwight Garner.

Paterno by Joe Posnanski
“Paterno” by Joe Posnanski, a Biography of the Coach

My review of the review is that Garner does a pretty straight job, but he injects some opinions that are still based on conjecture (which included accepting the Freeh report’s conjectures as fact). He feels that Paterno’s undergraduate experiences at Brown are given short shrift, and in this respect I admit that I always like looking back on the early days of figures who have become larger than life many years later.

As for Sandusky — which is a subject that will spur sales of the book — Garner asserts that there is no new information about the scandal itself, but there are revelations about the nuances of the Sandusky/Paterno relationship, to wit:

The book’s best chapter, and the one many people will turn to first, is titled simply “Sandusky.” Paterno hired Mr. Sandusky as a full-time assistant coach in 1969, when Mr. Sandusky was 25, and made him Penn State’s defensive coordinator eight years later. The two men disliked each other almost from the start, Mr. Posnanski reports, and he adds new detail about this uneasy relationship. Paterno thought Mr. Sandusky was a glory hound who wanted his job. Their styles were different. Paterno liked a drink now and then. Mr. Sandusky was a teetotaler.

I’ve got a Kindle copy of the book coming to me just as soon as Amazon releases it. My own review will be forthcoming.

 

Mark Emmert, Hypocrite

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It doesn’t require much more digging than is possible with a cheap computer and an Internet connection to find a plethora of reference points calling out Mark Emmert’s hypocrisy.

Take Ken Armstrong’s op-ed in the Seattle Times, for example. In essence, he opined that the culture at the University of Washington that Emmert walked into was just as corrupt, as would be just about any big-time football school.

Then, there was Emmert’s famous quote, “Simply put, success in LSU football is essential for the success of Louisiana State University.”

In 2010, Mark Emmert called Joe Paterno “the definitive role model of what it means to be a college coach.” He sang a much different tune on July 23 this year.

Then, there’s Ty Duffy’s piece, in which he states:

The punishment and the manner of its delivery, though, still carry the whiff of catering to the prevailing wind and charging triumphantly into an already razed village to plow salt into the fields. The true work has been and is being done and this distracts from it. The NCAA piled on, largely because it can right now with impunity.

Or, Bob Kravitz, of the Indianapolis Star:

It’s as if the NCAA looked in the mirror, didn’t like what it saw and reacted by lashing out at Penn State.

Of course, an equal number of writers have excoriated Penn State for its transgressions, stating that the penalties were deserved and appropriate. It is hard to fight public opinion where child victims are involved, where rationality and reason often take a backseat to emotion. Who can argue with the fact that children were mistreated and nobody did anything about it? Anything up to and including revocation of Penn State’s charter is on the table when child protection hysteria sets in.

Mark Emmert viewed this emotional climate as the perfect opportunity to pile on in order to show that the NCAA was “doing something” about the ignominious influence of football over academics, exceeding his authority by making Penn State the poster boy for all formerly good universities that have become vacuous football factories. If he could, by virtue of the unfortunate Sandusky scandal, make a negative example of Penn State, a purported paragon of athletic cleanliness and academic excellence, then other institutions would quake in their boots. No one was safe. Moreover, the public’s thirst for blood would be assuaged and the NCAA would be viewed as the hero.

A hero hiding a dirty not so little secret: that it actively promotes the football culture it condemned so visibly with Emmert’s Penn State grandstand play. To paraphrase Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel: never let a good crisis go to waste. Emmert hopped onto Penn State; it was his perfect “wag the dog” opportunity.

One problem with this approach, aside from its dishonesty, vindictiveness, and inappropriateness, is that throwing all the heavy artillery fire Penn State’s way left the ammunition locker empty. Having described Penn State’s issues as “unprecedented”, calling for maximum punishment, Emmert gave himself no leeway for penalizing schools that transgress in the areas of his purview, the confluence of athletics and academics.

That leads us to the University of North Carolina, a classic case of a big-time athletic program making a mockery of the so-called student-athlete. As you may recall, an internal audit revealed 54 ghost classes that never met yet yielded credit-hours and grades for the lucky students, most of whom were athletes steered to them by academic advisers. The university has expressed a reluctance to dig deeper, afraid that what its investigation revealed is only the tip of the iceberg. Chancelor Holden Thorp is hoping this will all go away, but he is pledging his support to whomever cares to get involved. He has now asked for a former state governor and a national management consulting firm to investigate the scandal.

But where is Mark Emmert? Having lunch with Vicky Triponey?

The NCAA has been mum on the subject.

Isn’t this the type of scandal that is completely under the NCAA’s purview? When will we see some action on this, Emmert? I want to know when the NCAA takes on the basketball and football culture at UNC. Shadenfreude perhaps, but I’m willing to bet that UNC gets off easy.

What’s your next move, Mark? The clock is running.