Ok, so this is embarrassing. Apparently when they sent me an email saying BSD HD was taking effect on Thursday they meant Thursday night. Which means we'll have to wait until Friday morning to play with the shiney bicycle. I regret the error. Please pick up a consolation pair of tube socks for your trouble on your way out.

Tonight there may be a short site outage for an hour or two while they upgrade to the BSD HD as we're calling it around here. Then tomorrow when you fire up your web browser there should be a nice shiney bicycle under the tree waiting for us all.

Have a good evening.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Indeed, this Thursday morning Black Shoe Diaries as you know it will come to an end. But we're not closing up shop here at BSD. We're going to be upgrading to the new SBNation platform. Call it BSD 2.0 if you will.

What is not going to change

1. The BSD URL will still be www.blackshoediaries.com
2. BSD will still be a Penn State blog.
3. The logo and blog colors.
4. I'll still be here putting together these crappy posts, though my new network name will be BSD. Can you believe the user name "Mike" was already taken?
5. Like a moth to the flame you'll still come here to waste valuable minutes of your life to read said crappy posts.

What is going to change

Holy crap. Where to start?

1. Fanposts - The Diaries will now be called Fanposts. They're basically the same thing with a 1000% cooler name. Only now we give you tools to really express yourself. You can highlight text in bold or italic. You can strike through text or put a box around a quotation. You can create bullet points and lists. You can create links to interesting articles. And you can do it all without having to dig out your complicated html cheat sheet as BSD 2.0 will provide you with all of these features at the click of a button.
2. Fanshots - Want to share a funny picture or video you think other BSD readers would enjoy? Or maybe you just want to point out an article without having to give a 300 character essay on it. Learn to use the Fanshots. Fanshots are quick posts that just say "Hey, check this out" without having to write a book to do it or fill in 300 characters of garbage.
3. Network Wide Access - You can go visit other sports blogs from time to time. I swear I won't get too jealous. The beauty of SBN 2.0 is that now you can cruise among all the SBN blogs without having to remember 20 different user names and passwords. One user name and one password will give you access to all of the sites. All you have to do is click the "Join" button on a blog to instantly take part in the community discussion after you are logged into another site.
4. More Information - With the click of a button you will have access to stats, scores, rosters, and schedules for Nittany Lion football and mens basketball.
5. Auto-Refreshing Comments - The comments section will automatically refresh every few seconds almost giving a chat room feel to them. Game day threads as we know them will never be the same.
6. Power To The People - SBN 2.0 will give the blog reader unprecedented power to customize their settings and interact with the online community. You will have an SBN profile page where you can list the blogs you frequent, customize the look of the front page to your liking, and attach an avatar to all of your comments, Fanposts, and Fanshots. Reward readers that offer intelligent views by recommending their posts and comments to others while flagging spammers and inappropriate comments to draw the attention of the blog administrator.

What You Should Do

If you want to get a head start on the new platform you can visit any number of SBN blogs that have already made the transition and sign up for an account. Once you do that follow the directions to claim your old accounts on the SBNation blogs you visit. That way you will get credit for all of your old comments.

Then if you want to you can visit one of the migrated blogs (BON is a good one) and start familiarizing yourself with the different features. Or if you just want to wait it out until Thursday and learn it on the fly that's fine too.

Interesting read in the Daily Collegian about a little known 75-hour rule all Penn State sports teams must abide by. The 75 hour rule states that no athletic team or student athlete can be absent from class for more than 75 hours per semester. From what I gather in the article, this is not an NCAA mandate, but rather a restriction Penn State places on itself. Many within the Penn State athletic department feel it puts our teams at an unfair disadvantage compared to other schools.

Now before anyone says this is why we're killing outselves in football, read the article and don't.

Bring On Coastal Carolina

There is No Name On My Jersey is already hitting the offseason wall as he has a preview of Coastal Carolina 120 days out from the contest. If you're dying for some real football analysis, go read it. In typical Homer-JB fashion he picks Penn State to win by 40 points. I think if Penn State fielded a team of 18 inch JoePa's he would still pick Penn State to win by three touchdowns. 18 inch Poz's would win by 100.

Pete Lisicky Scores!

David Jones confirms what most of us already knew. It's good to be Pete Lisicky.

And I thought playing basketball in Europe was a bad thing.

Dammit, Don't Call Me After 10

When Joe says don't call me after 10, he means in the morning. I was reading Sean Fitz's interview with Malcom Willis, the Maryland safety that committed to the Lions earlier this week, where Willis said he called Joe right after school to give him the good news. Here was Joe's response. (Note: Content from a premium article reproduced with consent from Blue-White Illustrated)

Make your own jokes.

Etcetera

Fox ranks the top 25 college football uniforms. Penn State comes in at #9.

It's rare that you will ever see BSD get in a pissing contest with the traditional media, or the "mainstream media" as they like to call themselves. A sports writer has to say something pretty stupid to ruffle my feathers. But it does happen, like last night when sports writer Buzz Bissinger shouted down Will Leitch from Deadspin on HBO. (Warning: May not be suitable for work due to foul language)

When you can't even get your first point out before the person brought on the show to offer a counter point to yours interjects and says you are "full of shit", it's probably not going to be a fun night. To Will's credit, he handled it beautifully just being polite and letting the vulgar piece of trash make an ass of himself. How ironic it was to watch Bissinger accuse Leitch of being vulgar and vile while calling Leitch "full of shit" and saying blogging "really pisses the shit" out of him. Then he dropped this line.

As a blogger, this really offends me. Would anyone out there say BSD is "dedicated to cruelty" if we make a joke about Joe Paterno's age? Or what if we craft a photoshop of Joe Paterno running to the outhouse on the sideline? Is that cruel? Maybe it is cruel. But it's also damn funny, which is part of the reason why you all keep coming back here as well as visiting other blogs: to be entertained. We all come here to escape real life for a brief period of time. We come here to forget about our jobs, our nagging bosses, our overbooked social lives, and whatever other problems we may have. Sports are a perfect outlet for such escapes, and sports blogging is becoming the 21st century extension of sports. So while it may be cruel to make fun of Joe Paterno's bathroom habits, nobody takes it seriously. Joe Paterno was caught on live national television running across the field with the squirts. Do you really think he cares what we're saying about him on this piece of crap blog?

Bissinger then states that blogs are "dedicated to journalistic dishonesty". I take major exception to this. First of all, I have never considered myself to be a journalist. I have no desire to be a journalist. I'm not interested in breaking stories and "creating" news. I prefer to react to what I see and offer my opinions and analysis. I rarely get inside scoops, and the ones I get come from people I've never met before and have no reason to believe. So I almost never run those stories until I read them from a credible source. When I do reveal inside information I always quantify it with a "rumor" disclaimer. I'm never going to state something as fact unless I believe it to be 100% true. Never.

According to Bissinger, blogs are contributing to the "complete dumbing down of America". Wow. And here I was blaming American Idol. But don't snicker at me, dear reader. Bissinger is blaming you for this one. It's clearly evident from the Deadspin text he and Costas were quoting that they cannot and do not differentiate between bloggers and commenters. Feel free to rip me apart for anything I say on BSD, but don't attack me for what my readers say. It's rather infuriating when someone attacks your blog because a reader made a comment suggesting they would cheer for Hitler over an SEC team.

But this begs the question: as the administrator of this tube of the internest, if I do not rebuke the comment, erase it, and ban the author, am I accepting responsibility for it? Hell no. Freedom of speech is what makes blogging great. I can throw my opinions out there without fear of the government throwing me in jail. But I do have to fear the BSD readers. When I call Malcolm Jenkins a "fucking liar" you are quick to voice your displeasure in my choice of language by flooding my email box. When I trash the Big East conference I get flamed in email as well as the comments from the Pitt and Rutgers trolls. It comes with the territory and I've learned to let it roll off my back. I have to accept the fact there are millions of people surfing the internet, and more than a few of them are going to think I'm a moron. I'll take responsibility for the things I say, but I'll be damned if I'm going to take responsibility for something some asshole says in my comments section. That's on you.

The beauty of blogs, and Costas and Bissinger clearly don't get this, is that we're not newspapers. We are communities. We are a group of people sharing a common interest who need a place to meet and talk about it. The things you read and say here are no different from the things you would hear and say at a tailgate party. That's how I view BSD. I'm not interested in building the stat meter so I can generate ad revenue. All I wanted when I started blogging was a place I could voice my opinions and exchange ideas with people. Ask me if I would prefer to have 10,000 hits per day and 10 comments per post or 1000 hits per day and 100 comments per post and I'll take more comments every time. Each comment is like a little present to me. When I open up BSD and see 1 New next to the comments I can't wait to open it and read it. Though lately I must confess this community has grown large enough to the point I honestly don't have time to read all of them. I scan through them to make sure everything stays civil and there aren't any flame wars brewing, but it blows my mind to see some of these comment threads grow to 30, 40, or 50 comments. I couldn't be more proud of what you and I have built here, and I hope you're proud of it too.

So call Bissinger a douchebag or whatever. I'm tired of the whole media vs. blogger thing. Many bloggers I know overreact to these types of things. Any time a reporter writes something even remotely resembles something they wrote three years ago they cry plagiarism. It's a little over the top, but I do think bloggers deserve more respect than they're given. As Leitch says in the video, blogging is hard damn work. These posts don't research and write themselves. And the overwhelming majority of us are not getting paid to do it either. That is all. End of rant.

The men who run college football are all meeting in a swanky hotel in Hollywood, Florida this week coming up with ways to take the fun out of the game and squeeze more coins out of your pockets. The hot topic of debate is the possibility of tweaking the BCS to include a "plus-one" game. Jim Delany isn't buying into it and says, "he's not the only one.

And that would be who? Certainly not SEC commissioner Mike Slive.

And how about ACC commissioner and BCS chairman John Swofford?

Talk about your wishy-washy answers. Is Swofford in favor of the "Plus-One" game or not? I can't tell from that quote. He feels good about the BCS but he wants to explore making it better. Whatever. But Swofford does raise some good points.

The Nittany Line has already done his best to shoot this down.

Excellent points from my colleague Galen, but Swofford does make sense to me. My biggest hangup with instituting a playoff in college football has been this insistence on simultaneously preserving the current bowl system. Dreamers say rotate the championship game among the BCS bowls and let the other BCS bowls host semi-final games.

It seems feasible. Teams could easily fly from Florida to Arizona or California in time for a game one week away. But what about the fans? Is it reasonable to expect Nittany Lion fans in State College to travel to Arizona one week and then have to turn around and fly to California the next? Most people I know can't afford to do this. The cost of airfare, meals, hotel, and tickets is pretty outrageous not to mention the time off of work. Some people would do it, but not enough to fill 80,000 seat stadiums. The bigger schools like Notre Dame, Penn State, Michigan, and Ohio State would stand a chance, but imagine the horror in years when a small school like Rutgers or Wake Forest qualify. And that will scare off the bowls from agreeing to such a deal.

College football playoffs have been around for years in Division I-AA. But they play home games through the first few rounds. The home town fans are already in place and the visiting fans only get maybe a few thousand seats. There is no way you will ever see this happening in Division I-A. The bowl games are entrenched and here to stay. They are never going to agree to just walk away and let the NCAA take their ball and go home. So how do we fix it? Sadly, at this point I don't think we can.

But I can tell you what I would do in a perfect world. First of all four teams isn't enough. If March is madness, then I want December to be demented. I would like to see eight or sixteen teams. That would make for three or four rounds of playoffs. All on Saturdays and most of them falling over the winter break. Don't give me crap about "preserving the student athlete" when you send basketball players on the road for over half of every spring semester.

But to take a page from the book from NCAA basketball, the best solution I can see is to have regional quarter and semi-final games like the NCAA tournament. Have an Eastern, Southern, Midwestern, and Pacific regional bracket and host those games in geographically strategic areas. Host games in New Orleans, Miami, and Tempe and call them the Sugar, Orange and Fiesta bowls if you want to. But come up North and host games in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia as well.

The next piece of the puzzle is deciding who gets to play. And in my opinion it has to be conference champions. I've always felt if you can't win your conference you don't deserve to play for the National Championship. I don't care if your team is a late starter. Start earlier next year. And I don't care if the fourth best team from the SEC could destroy the ACC champion. Don't tell me about polls and computer rankings and head-to-head matchups during the regular season. Win your conference. Consider it the unofficial first round of the playoffs.

Of course you have the problem of Notre Dame and the non-BCS conferences. Again, in a perfect world I would make Notre Dame join a conference. Their arrogant insistance on remaining independent has to be factored into any decision and frankly I'm tired of it. Get with the rest of the 100-plus college football programs and join the 21st century. As for the other non-BCS conferences, the easiest solution is to expand the playoff to 16 teams and allow them to send their conference champions to first round slaughters. But this creates a new set of problems.

As a Penn State fan I would not be enthused about having to drive to Indianapolis to watch the Nittany Lions play MAC champ Akron in the first round. I would probably be inclined to skip that one and hold out my money for a second round opponent. While not pretending to speak on behalf of all Nittany Lions everywhere, I suspect a lot of fans think like I do. Unattractive matchups will lead to poor ticket sales and television ratings which leads to less dollars. And we all know how the NCAA feels about less dollars.

So I think the best solution has to be an eight team playoff where the conference champions from the six BCS schools automatically get in. The remaining two schools will be selected from the conference champions of the non-BCS schools. This will allow the Hawaii's and Boise States to get in when they have good years, but we won't be forced to watch the lions and tigers eat the Christians like Roman days.

This post turned out longer than I intended. Sorry about that. But it's the offseason so let's have the college football playoff free-for-all debate.

Big news today as Penn State landed their second verbal commitment for the class of 2009, Maryland safety Malcolm Willis.

Willis stands 6 feet tall and weighs 210 pounds. Last year he recorded 95 tackles and 3 INT. He also played quarterback but is projected to play safety for Penn State.

Irish Arrogance

You may have heard a few days ago that Notre Dame and Rutgers were working on a deal to play in football. The deal fell through, and the the New York Times explains why.

Bravo to Rutgers. Notre Dame continues to play this game where they keep one foot in the Big East and out foot out the door. They'll take advantage of all the Big East has to offer for their other sports programs, but they insist on keeping their television deal for themselves. When they go to a BCS bowl game they won't share the revenue with the other Big East members, but when a bowl committee is looking at Big East teams Notre Dame gets lumped in.

I'm glad to see someone in the Big East telling the Irish to go shove it. It takes a lot of nerve to walk into a self respecting school like Rutgers and request a six year deal where half the games will be played in South Bend and the other half will be played at a neutral site. But it doesn't seem to bother the Irish too bad.

Ten bucks says it's Syracuse or Temple.

General Lee

This weekend the team voted on their captains in a squad meeting. But Joe Paterno tapped one guy personally.

I think this is a great move. Keep Lee involved with the team in a quasi-coaching capacity. He can still fire everyone up and verbally kick their ass if he sees them dogging it. His experience in the film room is invaluable, and it's somewhat of a blessing that he will be around another year to coach all of these great young linebackers into shape.

As for the other captains, if I had to make a guess I think it's going to be Shipley, Williams, and Tyrell Sales. But I'm really pulling for Deon Butler to somehow get selected.

Eeeew that smell. Can't you smell that smell?

Remember last year there was a major concern about the number of port-a-johns at the Notre Dame game? It seems the university got the message and they are losing their patience with public urination.

I must say I after going to Michigan and Temple last year I think Penn State does an ok job of providing facilities. Public urination happens in Happy Valley, but I don't think it's out of control like I saw in Ann Arbor and Philadelphia. But the last part of the article did catch my eye.

This is beginning to get seriously out of control. More and more I see tailgate parties that just throw their empty cups and cans on the ground and make no effort to pick them up. Is it so hard to bring a trash bag with you? For goodness sakes, the students go around handing out the blue trash bags to throw your recyclables into. All you have to do is leave the bag on the ground when you leave. I hate to make broad generalizations, but it's pretty much exclusively the younger generation of fans I see doing this. Frankly, it disgusts me. Can we do something about that?

Scott-Free

I'm late to the party here, but all of the charges against Austin Scott have been dropped.

Gee, it's with "deep regret" we have to turn an innocent man free. That's just the kind of attitude I love to hear from a district attorney. How do I know Scott was an innocent man? Maybe because the victim accuser has a history of raising bogus rape charges.

The really sad thing here is that the DA knew about the bogus charges and tried to take this to trial anyway.

So the credibility of the accuser has no importance in a case of he-said-she-said? Really? Nobody can convince me that the State College district attorney isn't out to score a big win in court and throw a Penn State football player in jail. If you still don't believe me, read the transcript of the phone conversation between Scott and the accuser the police recorded the morning after.

This, was all the DA had to go on. Her word against his, and the DA knew she had a history of bringing false rape charges against people. Yet he pushed on with the trial. That, is "deeply regretful".

You know what else is "regretful" too? I remember after the charges were announced people were posting pages of the Daily Collegian all over campus with the story of Scott being dismissed from the team and they wrote in big letters "What about the victim?" on it. I think all of those people owe Mr. Scott a huge apology right about now. But I doubt one is coming.

After the Blue White game I was looking forward to getting home and listening to Joe's post game press conference. It was indeed entertaining, but it featured the usual questions from David Jones.

Nice to see David Jones now believes he speaks on behalf of all Penn State fans. But anyway...

I'd love to meet the high school kid thinking of playing for Penn State that could not pick Joe Paterno out of a lineup. That's pretty comical.

Anyway, I see what Jones is trying to do, but frankly I'm getting a little tired of it. You can rephrase the question as many ways as you like, but you're not going to get Joe Paterno to tell you how long he intends to coach. And he's not going to tell you his wish for a succession plan and you're not going to get him to confess he thinks he's hurting the program. So why bother?

I feel the same way when I cruise the message boards and see people write 1000 word essays on why Joe is hurting recruiting and we'll never be a national title contender while he's here. Here's my advice to all of you. "Well duh!"

Do what I've done. Accept the fact that we'll likely be an eight or nine win team over the next few years. We're going to see a lot of talent choose to go play elsewhere. We're going to lose a few games with conservative gameplans. That's the way it's going to be. Maybe we'll get lucky and they can put a ten win season together and we'll manage to go to a BCS Bowl game. But for the most part mediocrity will be the norm until Joe is gone.

But we should enjoy the time while he's here. Think of it as an enjoyable ride down a country road instead of flying down the interstate at 80 mph. You're looking out the window at lakes and pastures full of horses instead of rocks and trees and filthy rest stops. Joe's days are numbered. Everyone knows he can't do this much longer, and when he's gone I think we're all going to miss him.

The day will come when we will be a power again. I read the quotes from all these kids we go after. They all come away from Penn State completely blown away by the atmosphere. They all rave about the facilities and the stadium. We're sitting on a gold mine here, people. They all list Penn State in their top two or three schools, but they just can't pull the trigger on us, and it's because of the uncertainty of the coaching staff. Keep in mind that when Joe leaves we'll probably lose Galen Hall and Dick Anderson too, so there will be an infusion of new coaches on the offensive side of the ball. Choose the right people and we can effectively put up a fence that extends from Lake Erie down the PA/OH border and down through Virginia to the Chesapeake and claim everything inside it as ours. Penn State will dominate the east coast in recruiting when we get a new coach. Write it down.

Joe's Next Career

I for one will miss Joe's press conferences. He's always good for a one liner or two. And you always get a perspective from a man frozen in time some thirty years ago. He's always pointing out how silly we are to focus on things we call news that he considers insignificant. One of the drawbacks to attending the Blue-White Game in person is not being able to hear Joe in the broadcast booth as is his annual tradition during the scrimmage. Here are a few samples from the broadcast.

When you're 81 years old you get to say anything on your mind and you don't really care what people think. That's why Joe belongs in the booth.

I've got more to share, but I think that's long enough for now. Everyone get back to work and I'll put up more later this afternoon.

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. It's been a crazy couple of weeks and I've had a lot on my mind. None of it was Penn State related. But it was good to step away for a few days from the constant talk about Joe, injuries, and the players' off the field behavior. Hopefully my batteries are charged and we can get back into the daily grind at BSD. Let's kick off with some great news.

Despite the disappointing season, the men's basketball program continues on the rise as Ed DeChellis has already landed his first verbal commitment for the class of 2009.

Marshall led his team to a 22-7 record and the PIAA playoffs last year while averaging 19 points per game. His outstanding play earned him Second Team All State honors as a junior. While the recruiting services haven't had a chance to rate him yet, everyone who has seen this kid play says he's a fantastic get for the program. Anytime you can steal a Pennsylvania kid from Temple and St. Joe's it's a good day. Everyone expects Marshall to make an immediate impact at the two guard from the day he steps on campus in 2009. With him, Battle, Woodward, and Babb we should have a fantastically athletic backcourt for the next several years.

The Big Ten-ACC Not-So Challenge

Sticking with basketball, it was announced this week that Penn State will play Georgia Tech in the 2008 Big Ten-ACC challenge. Is it me, or is anyone else getting tired of this? I mean, it's great exposure for the conference to play teams like Duke, North Carolina, Maryland, and Wake Forest, but is anyone else getting tired of getting our asses handed to us as a conference every year? Penn State is 2-5 since this thing started up in 1999 and the Big Ten has yet to win the challenge in eight years. Maybe a Big XII or SEC challenge would be a better fit for us. Let the ACC set something up with the Big East which is more on their level. I'm just sayin'.

I hope my liver can handle this

There's going to be lots of time for tailgating and pre-game parties this year as Penn State is going to have a lot of late kickoffs.

Etcetera

Nice article on the quarterback competition. I still think we're ok no matter who wins the job.

How bad do linebackers want to come to Penn State? With all of the talent we've recruited in recent years, they may get beat out by a walk-on. If Josh Hull still does not have a scholarship it's a crying shame.