“Did you know that the Academy now has a Woodstock Academy Athletic Hall of Fame? Where is the Woodstock Academy Academic Hall of Fame for students who graduate and go on to do great things? ”
From John
It will be interesting to see how the punishment of Penn State for the Sandusky situation plays out over the coming years. I may start watching their games to follow this. For years I have been saying (to myself and Becki) that Paterno needed to be retired. His behavior in recent years on and off the field had become more and more erratic. The swiftness of his firing last November indicated to me that Penn State was tired of the Paterno thing even before the Sandusky situation. Let’s face it – age diminishes judgment and this starts in the elderly long before it becomes recognized. Paterno was 85 and scheduled to continue coaching this year if the scandal hadn’t developed and he hadn’t died. Paterno could have avoided much of this scandal if he had retired or had been forced to retire at a reasonable age – let’s say 75 or earlier. Nevertheless, it’s hard for me to believe that Sandusky’s pedophilia first surfaced at Penn State in 1998.
I confess that I enjoy watching college football. This all started when my father took me to Yale games in the 1950s. Since then I have attended college football games at, yes, Penn State, Ohio State, all Univ. of Pittsburgh games for four years, Annapolis, Stanford, all home games at the Air Force Academy in 1994, and games at UConn’s Rentschler Field. Becki, Mariah, and I took Ernie and Zack Wetzel to the first game there in 2003 when UConn embarrassed the Big 10 Indiana. We sat on the 40 yard line on a clear day behind the Hoosier bench and joined the chorus chanting “Hooooosier, Hooooosier…” as their rattled quarterback started shouting at his own players for dropping his wobbly passes.
In the fall of 1969, I went with a couple of guys from my lab at Pitt Medical School to take in a Penn State game. Guess who had been their coach since 1966, and guess who was there in his first year as assistant coach – Paterno and Sandusky. It was another beautiful day for football. The signal for the Penn State players to run onto the field was the deafening roar of the Nittany Lion over the loud speaker. The team that year may have been the greatest team in Penn State history with Lydell Mitchell at halfback (later with the Baltimore Colts), Franco Harris at fullback (later with the Pittsburgh Steelers) and concert pianist Mike Reid at Defensive Tackle (later with the Cincinnati Bengals). Some years later I watched Franco Harris catch the Immaculate Reception from Quarterback Terry Bradshaw to beat the Raiders in the playoffs in Pittsburgh.
It’s sad that there is a seamy side of football on the school side, the spectator side, and the athletic booster side that should be obvious to all who follow football and other sports; just follow the sports news for a year and you’ll know what I am talking about. Did you know that the Academy now has a Woodstock Academy Athletic Hall of Fame? Where is the Woodstock Academy Academic Hall of Fame for students who graduate and go on to do great things? Buzz Bissinger at the Daily Beast, who wrote “Friday Night Lights” about a high school team in Odessa (where two of my daughters graduated), feels that there is an insidious culture in high powered sports that explains the Penn State mess and cover-up. I would agree with him and this is why the NCAA penalties against Penn State were appropriate, if not enough. I don’t think it would diminish the excitement of college football if the NCAA limited scholarships to just 22 players for every team. Of course they would not do this because it would diminish their empire.
I have mentioned this before, but Becki and I stopped going to Rentschler Field after a while because we got tired of rubbing elbows with the drunks in the stands and stepping around steaming puddles of barf as we left the stadium. I almost wrote the governor about this but then just let it go. One of my daughters and her husband went to Texas A&M and they pointed out to me that there is no sale of beer or other alcoholic beverages there. Why can’t UConn do the same? I will still go to a game once in a while because I enjoy the spectacle. Maybe I’ll try out the spectacle of the Academy’s new football field this fall.
I no longer follow sports for a few reasons. One, I don’t own a television. Two, it epitomizes our culture’s misplaced priorities and distracts from what is truly important. Three, I dislike being a spectator. Four, sporting events from the college level up are not about athletics or role modeling, they are about big money. Like most institutions who get too big and the bottom line too important, Penn State placed their reputation before their ethical standards. I am happy about the NCAA’s decisions, but I don’t think they went far enough. I also can’t help comparing this to the Roman Catholic Church where essentially the same behavior occurred and for the same reasons, but with much much more deviancy, breadth, and cover up. Yet the Roman Catholic Church faced little compared to Penn State in terms of retribution and punishment. The behavior of both institutions was beyond despicable and totally inexcusable. That anyone continues to watch Penn State football or give a dime to the RC church is beyond my understanding.
Wow, I agree with pretty much everything you’re saying here LibDem. I do own a television but I don’t watch it much, I completely agree with your points number 2 & 4 and I’m indifferent on #3, I don’t mind being a spectator for things like concerts and shows. You made some very good points.
I can barely follow the news reports about the Penn State scandal because the idea of a large institution covering up this problem turns my stomach. The fine imposed is a joke as it will simply be passed through to the taxpayers. The program should have been shut down for five years which would have flushed the people who knew and did not act out of the system. The explanation for not doing so that I heard was that when the SMU program was shut down they did not make it back to a bowl game for 20 years. I mean, was there a bowl game with only one team showing up for twenty years? So what?
And I have the same reaction to the RC church, which I think is destroying itself at least in the U.S.
Thanks Loadstar. I think most of us share the same basic values and were it not for that, all would be quite hopeless would it not?
JTO- I’d love for you to weigh in on the LIBOR scandal. You have a nice way of explaining economic/financial issues. I’ve followed it a bit, but there seems to be an argument out there that suggests the scandal is overrated. It seems to me to be quite unethical though. Thoughts? Thanks.
LIBOR is the acronym for London Interbank Offered Rate. It is the interest rate established periodically by a committee of banks under the auspices of the Bank of England, the UK central bank, and is the estimated interest rate that top banks would charge each other for short term I.e. overnight loans. LIBOR is established for multiple currencies including UK, all of Europe, Japan and the U.S.
This is similar to the functioning of the U.S. Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee, which, similarly, is staffed by Fed officials and prominent bank heads, and set U.S. Treasury Note sales and purchases by the Fed,
which effectively establish core interest rates in the U.S.
LIBOR and U.S. Treasuries are both used worldwide as a baseline risk-free interest rate over which interest rates are calculated for all forms of debt in the global credit markets including $350 trillion (yes, trillion) in derivative securities.
What has been discovered is that the bankers were setting LIBOR not based on its intended purpose, but in order to benefit their massive bets made by their institutions on derivatives related to interest rates and currency values. This went on for a period of years.
This scandal is so massive and so corrupt that it makes the last crisis look small. Putting it in perspective, U.S. GDP is about $13 trillion, China/Japan are tied for second at about $4 trillion; Germany and UK are $3-3.5 trillion. Derivatives outstanding at the beginning of the financial crisis were Bout $60 trillion, or equivalent to World GDP. Derivatives outstanding today are about $350 Trillion, or 6 years of worldGDP.
Sandy Weill, who merged Citibank and Travelers into the first megabank, and singlehandedly drove the repeal of Glass Steagall, was quoted the other day as saying, as a result of the LIBOR scandal, that the banks need to be broken up as they will continue to take extraordinary risks at the expense of the taxpayers
and depositors. This is the equivalent of NapoleN calling for a end to militRy conquests.
The banks have become not only too big to fail but to big to regulate, as the elected representatives who regulate them need their money to run for office. And they will bankrupt the country – it can happen. This is why Romney is raising so much more money than Obama. This crisis has knocked the middle class of the country to its knees and these characters are moving in for the kill.