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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We’re Listening, NWU Playaz

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Quaecumque sunt veraToday is the day on which the Northwestern Wildcats will vote on whether they will organize a union. Interesting times in collegiate sports are afoot. While the vote today is not going to instantly transform anything, it is one step in what can be a major shake-up of the whole mess.

I would expect the Wildcats to reject the unionization. By their own admission, they’re treated pretty well there. Northwestern is the starting point, a test case, as it were, only because this effort to unionize college sports and treat players as university employees was spearheaded by former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter. Northwestern is a private school with some pretty good credentials. My thought is that so-called student-athletes there have a good thing going and won’t want to rock the boat, no matter how much Colter lobbies for his case.

Even if they do vote for the union, the NLRB decision that the players could be treated as employees is under review. Nothing happens very fast in Washington, as you well know.

But the times, they are a-changin’, as Bob Dylan would assert. College sports are big money generators, and greedy meat hooks gravitate toward big money generators. A transformation will take place, and these rumblings will become a groundswell no matter how the NWU players vote.

Certainly, the NWU model will be mimicked elsewhere, in venues more likely to go the union direction, where players are not treated as well as they are at Northwestern. Basketball mills might be an early target due to the fewer number of players and the inner city urban nature of the constituency.

Unions aside, this turkey believes that these so-called student athletes are actually university employees, and they need to be compensated for putting money in the till for their employers. They need to be reimbursed for living expenses, and paid a decent salary. Furthermore, they need to get a cut of the money they generate from product endorsements. This can be an indirect kind of thing, such as the establishment of a fund for ongoing medical expenses and living expenses for warriors injured in combat. It can’t go on the way it has gone — with the universities and the NCAA reaping all the rewards while so-called student-athletes risk life-changing injuries to generate rewards they will never see.

 

Paterno Statue Proposal Reprise

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Joe Paterno Statue ProposalAlmost a year ago, I posted a proposal concerning creating a memorial statue of Joe Paterno in downtown State College. I’ve had people ask me where it came from but I never really knew. Now, this idea is heating up again, and as one would expect, not without its share of controversy, vitriol, and dare we say warm acceptance.

The proposed location for the $300,000 statue, which will be created by the sculptor Zenos Frudakis, is outside The Tavern restaurant, an old eatery and watering hole we used to reserve for special dates or otherwise for rich kids back when we were students. It is centrally located on College Avenue, a focal point for returning alumni. The target date is 2015. Funding will be generated through Kickstart.com, among other sources.

(Now I launch into a tangential rant about “alumni“. You are not “an alumni“. Alumni is the plural of alumnus, the Latin masculine noun. Alumnae is the plural of alumna, the Latin feminine noun. Do we want to get into neuter? I guess so — we have to be all-inclusive, for diversity’s sake. Alumnum would be the singular and alumna would be the plural, the same as the feminine plural, if there was indeed such a thing as a neutered alumnus or alumna. However, to describe a mixed collection of masculine, feminine, and neuter ex-students, we use alumni, because the Romans hadn’t yet been curtailed by the Feminazis into butchering their language for the sake of so-called political correctness, as it were. End of grammar Nazi rant coupled with male Chauvinist piguousness.)

But I digress. 🙂

Here are some links where you can view various versions of this story.

That’s enough, already!

If I could get Twitter to do its thing properly, I’d show you some of the negative reactions I observed there, but I cannot seem to get it to generate the “embed” code today.

Five More Months, Damnit!

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Well, the Blue-White-Grey game has come and gone, so we’ve had the last taste of football until August. The game gave us a chance to build our expectations for the fall, and then cruelly kissed us off until then, but such are the tortuous ways of football. We use the off-season to bitch about Mark Emmert, Vickey Triponey, and other sordid crap.

Coming out of the spring classic, there is good reason for optimism at running back, and the damn secondary was looking better than I’ve seen from this bunch of jokers in quite a while. I mean, seriously. (I know, right?) Clearly, the big problem will be staffing the interior lines, and I’m still a little shaky about the kicking game.

It was good to see the loyal fans returning to Beaver Stadium for the spring game — 72,000 of them (or 82,000 unofficially, if you believe Franklin — I guess he must have counted). It appeared to be a gorgeous day, so I’m interested in knowing who of my five readers actually made it to the game.

Here at the Cave, we gathered and watched the damn delayed BTN broadcast while enjoying the usual Bacchanalia, which this time featured Maryland crab cakes contributed by Jackstand, who commutes to Maryland. They arrived via FedEx and were amazingly fresh, completely authentic, and damn good.

Not much to say, I know. Now, to compound my time expenditures, the NHL Playoffs loom large, and I’m back to home improvement hell. The Penguins take on the Columbus Blue Jackets for their first-round series starting Wednesday. As for me, I think I’ll next vent here about home improvement loans and the schmucks who approve them, unless the siding job takes an unexpected turn.