FanPost

Would you rather...

The events of the past couple days (Tressel resigning, DeChellis resigning) have made me wonder what we, as fans of Penn State really value.  With Paterno and the Grand Experiment we always talk about Success with Honor.

Then I got to thinking about Paterno's quote, "Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good."  It is all well and good to say that you want both, but what if you had to choose one or the other.  On one hand you have the situation like at Ohio State.  They've undeniably had a lot of success this past decade, but it is hard to find any honor in their program (despite all the claims of Tressel being a "great man", he may have molded boys into men, but he also led by the example that it is ok to cheat so long as you win.  Men molded with those values typically turn out to be doucheabags as adults).

On the other hand you have Penn State basketball.  By all accounts DeChellis was a great guy, did things the right way, but didn't have much success.  If it weren't for the football team (and other university sports) generally performing so well, no one would ever really know anything about Penn State basketball.  Not to get into a debate with Fugi on the semantics of what "honor" and "cheating" means, and whether or not the athletic department is honorable in the way it treats the basketball program, at very least from ED down, the program had honor, but not much success.

Then there is this article ( http://eye-on-collegefootball.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/24156338/29674892 ) questioning whether Tressel's tenure at OSU was worth it.  Sure, they'll possibly be hit with a couple years of scholarship hits and postseason bans, but they've also come off one of the most successful decades in college football history.

 

I just wonder what we as fans would choose:

Success without honor: a bunch of conference and national titles, but a good chance that any and all of them can and should have a huge asterisk next to them in the record books.  Still, we'll have a lot to talk about, be on TV all the time, and get to gloat in the face of all the other "wannabe pretenders" who can't cheat compete at the same level as us.  We feast on everyone, and sure the food tastes like crap, but hey, at least there's a lot of it.

Honor without success: I guess one of the service academies would be good to place here (plus ED chose to go to Navy over staying at Penn State, so there's that, too).  Does anyone really pay attention to their football teams anymore?  Do they even have a blog?  Without the success our football team has had we wouldn't even be here talking about any of this, we'd be fans of one of those schools that, frankly, no one cares about (this doesn't completely apply to the service academies, because at least they have ancillary things for people to care about).  We would have no platform to use to promote the Grand Experiment, because the Grand Experiment would have been a failure (and without that forum, where would we talk about all our tangents?).  We would have a very well seasoned dish, but unfortunately we're dying of starvation, so a lot of good that seasoning is doing.

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