"You gotta move forward. I don't see the dark clouds. I see sunny days and blue skies. With respect for the past, we are moving this program into a new era of Penn State football."
*I'm absolutely certain she's not actually singing, and pretty sure that guy has no idea how to play the guitar. Additionally, great case-in-point on YouTube commenting which, if you haven't seen it already, is being well documented by the Mothership in the CAPS LOCK REAL TALK series.
Speaking of the past and September 1991. Penn State beat Cincinnati 81-0 that month. It took 10 Minutes Or Less 12 minutes and 22 seconds to cover the action. That's still a point every nine seconds.
But we digress, although speaking of the past. Penn State hasn't had a regular starter at QB since 2009. That doesn't sound right but it definitely is. BOB agrees with the rest of us that it's time:
The former New England Patriots offensive coordinator apparently wants to fend off a quarterback controversy long before one starts. That is why he will name a starter more than three months before Penn State's Sept. 1 season opener against Ohio University. "You can't waste time, in my opinion, with a quarterback battle during training camp."
Obvious but worth pointing out this is a direct 180 degree difference compared to the old philosophy, which could politely be called Keeping Your Options Open. I don't have to tell you it didn't work, although I can't say for certain that was the fault of the philosophy.
The turf grass people exhale, at least. There will be no semi-final college football playoff games in the north. The news was a well orchestrated barrage of quotes that make no sense but is well summarized at mgo and then later boiled down properly:
I give up.
The lack of logic for not putting up a fight here is well echoed, yet the finances of this demand more echoing. Students are poor, their tuition is rising and traveling costs more. State College is hours from a real airport any student could afford a ticket out of.
The anchor college football chains itself to in justifying its many, many contradictions is The College Experience. This is heavily dependent on providing benefit to the current students. You can make utilitarian arguments about it funding other sports, but the arms races in swimming and soccer and so on go away when you don't have football budgets to fuel them, which makes the argument a silly one. If college football doesn't benefit enrolled 18-23 year olds it shouldn't exist.
So those current students? Over 70% of Pennsylvania's leave with debt, only four other states burden there own with larger balances, and the Penn State administration is going along with a plan that makes is significantly more financially burdensome for them to participate in the college football experience, and thus the college experience. I give up.
Does Penn State offer courses in frequent flyer optimization? By the way, BOB's recent comments about wanting to return to some kind of (previously discussed here) off-site Kickoff Classic early in the year aren't helping. Take a very hypothetical Penn State team that finishes the regular season ranked #1 in the country after the switch to nine conference games. You've got a "home" game in NJ, five potential Big Ten road games after the switch to nine total (in a geography agnostic divisional system, to boot), a B1G CCG in The House Chain Hotels Built, plus a semi in LA or Miami or somewhere, then a national championship game in, I mean Jerry World, right? We're talking well over five digits in miles traveled.
There is no nobler cause. The BTN wasn't just a money grab but also a chance to "highlight academic achievement throughout the universities." Well those days are over, the network is cutting Penn State (and all) academic programming by 95% for, what else, low ratings.
League officials say the 660-hours goal turned out to be impractical. A show about one university alienated other viewers [lolz --ed], and universities had varying levels of video capability.
"Most of them didn't have the resources to produce the shows. It was always set up to be at their cost, not the network's," Delany said. "We were willing to give the time, but the universities had to create the shows. When we came up with the number of hours, we didn't know what the schools were capable of producing."
The obvious answer to the problem of schools not funding BTN programming at their own cost would be to fund said programming with the insane payouts the network is providing and structure it in a way with Fox that accurately books it as an operating cost, taken off the top before sending cash out to schools. This is all based on the presumption that they wanted academic programming to succeed in the first place, and didn't simply use it as a cover of innocence when they launched the network. At the very least this was a great opportunity for current broadcast students that's going away. Again, The College Experience.
In scores of other games. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture at Penn State. A day at the beach in State College.
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