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WE FOUND A BAG MAN
A very eye-opening and extremely well-written piece by Steven Godfrey over at the Mothership touches upon the "bag men" down in SEC territory who help deliver regular cash payments to current football players or recruits. The ones who do it properly are never known or recognized, and they even speak in their own code, as this excerpt will show:
"I can call up a guy in real estate and say, 'Hey man, we thought about it, and let's do that 24-acre plot. How's a 4 p.m. meeting sound?'"
The first number is the player, usually designated by a jersey number. Here, it's player No. 24. The time is the cost. In this example, $4,000. Listen long enough and it's not much of a code, but there's never been much to codebreaking here, either.
Furthermore, the below excerpt regarding the secrecy behind a bag man's identity helps to illustrate the fact that bag men are essentially the sporting world's equivalent of CIA agents.
A good bag man will never be famous. He will never be that guy hovering right next to the head coach after a big win. His name will never be known by the majority of students, fans, and alumni of the university he loves. There is no dead bag man memorial on the campus of any football powerhouse. There are no memorial scholarships named after the guy who gave a running back's mother $3,000 a month for four years.
"There's some guy I know. He's in the [official booster club for the university]. I've known him almost all my life; he's a friend of my family. Guy gives about $50,000 a year to the program. And so he gets to wear a jacket and have his name in the [annual alumni magazine] and gets to shake hands with the coaches and feel really goddamn important. I see this guy all the time, and we talk about the team, and he's always trying to big dick about how important he is to the program. Now let me ask you, who do you think is more important to this team winning next season? Him with his $50,000 getting bathrooms painted in the basketball arena, or what I do with not even a quarter of that much money?"
Your Blue-White Game Weather Forecast
According to Accuweather, it's gonna be freakin' awesome
Audrey Snyder at PennLive wrote about how Geno Lewis is embracing the role of being Christian Hackenberg's go-to wide receiver. Obviously, the WR position's lack of returning production sticks out like a sore thumb, especially when compared to its Tight End counterpart, but that was also a glaring weakness two years ago before you-know-whostepped up to fill in the seemingly vast empty void.
Penn State Alumni Sports Writers Weighed In on James Franklin...
And (to absolute nobody's surprise), they're overwhelmingly positive about his recruiting abilities and accomplishments at Vanderbilt. However, a couple of the writers did express reservations about the rape case involving the Vanderbilt football players and the importance of Franklin making sure he maintains a reasonable level of transparency within the program. While I understand their concerns, one has to think that Joyner, Erickson, and the rest of the search committee thoroughly vetted Franklin with a fine-toothed comb regarding that case. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that if anything about the way Franklin answered their questions about it gave them the slightest of pauses, we would likely be talking about how we're getting our first look at Al Golden or Mike Munchak's Penn State football team, right now.
In Case You've Been Living in an Eco-Village for the Past Day...
Stephen Colbert is taking over David Letterman's spot on CBS' The Late Show next year. As exciting as this sounds, one reasonable concern to have (aside form Colbert no longer playing his conservative talk show host persona) is whether Colbert will be forced to water down his shtick for broadcast TV.
If This Doesn't Excite You For The World Cup, Then You're Not a Real Amurrican (or your name is Devon Edwards)
Onward State Also Wants You To Help Fund Our Magazine
Proof positive. Now, if you haven't done so already, click on that pretty picture of Hack below you and make a contribution, or we will kill a kitten...I keed of course, but seriously, if you truly love us and you want to read some awesome stuff about Penn State football to help get you through the long Summer, then please consider giving us some of your hard-earned cash.
