A Thorough And Honest Review Of The Culture Of College Football

That's the end quote from the NY Times piece on the Freeh report, and I know I'm a week late and many dollars short on this, but...

Um, why should this assessment be limited to the Penn State program?

Yes, the PSU program spent decades looking the other way as a child predator had his way with a spiraling number of victims. And that's awful on every level, not the least of which is that it strikes at the core of twin taboos of American society - sexual aggression against children (easily visualized, of course, as the audience's own kids), and homosexuality as a communicable practice. Not just one-time damage, as it were. Yes, indeedy, I'm going there.

But this is just the ice that's above the surface, folks. There's loads more underneath. And yes, perhaps a few years of college ball with relatively light schedules and not as much off-season work and generally smaller and slower athletes means that the long-term concussive damage isn't as big of a deal here... or, well, um, maybe not. Certainly the money that's being made off the players isn't being distributed equally, and certainly the human abuses on an individual program level are so rife that scandal is seen more like inclement weather than true crime.

I guess the point is this:

All sports, at some level, are timewaste and vice and gambling and sexism and violence, and we accept that because there's also good in the mix, and watching people excel and fail under duress is what human drama is all about.

Football ramps it up much higher, because the long-time players of it are obscenely compensated, but have the life expectancy of drug lords. (Forgive me, "Breaking Bad" season premiere happened tonight. I'm in Full Heisenberg mode here.)

College football goes even further because 99% of the players are at their last point before the kill floor, the last go-around until it all ends and they have to find some other dream to chase down. One that doesn't involve, well, being paid like a drug lord.

College football programs take advantage of this. Always have, always will. And the act corrupts any other good the programs might do, create conditions of venality and secrecy and culpability that make Sandusky-style coverups and victimization...

Well, I don't want to say the rule, because I have no evidence of this being the rule, and I don't want to imagine that there are dozens of other reprobates plying their disease on children, from coast to coast and at every level.

But if there were...

Would anyone really be surprised?

A Brief And Obvious Point About Joe Paterno

Once upon a time, Paterno ran into a spot of controversy for his activism in the Republican Party.

He appeared at a GOP convention as a head delegate for Pennsylvania, nominated George Bush The Elder, and rah-rahhed for the cameras.

At the time, he was, of course, a publicly paid employee, which meant that the taxpayers of Pennsylvania were paying for him to use his celebrity in the cause of a political cause that they really might not have agreed to. There was some hue and cry about this, which Paterno more or less ignored.

You see, he knew best. And having known best, there really wasn't more to be said about it.

Around the same time, JoePa more or less left my field of possible respect when he directed his program away from independent status, away from any kind of fair play with neighboring programs, and into the loving arms of the Big Ten.

At the time, I actually cared a bit about college football, because I was going to school at Syracuse, and we had shook off a decades-long period of suck to more or less crush PSU in our home dome. JoePa clearly wanted no part of that thing, no part of a speed team within driving distance to the north that now had the ability to enact years of payback for the decades of jobbing.

So Paterno's PSU team stopped playing my Orangemen. At the time, I thought it was just that JoePa wanted to avoid losing to the new power in eastern football. But really, it was more about money. He knew best.

Last year, of course, he contributed to the circus, and this week, it was learned, he did a lot more than that.

So, to everyone who has joined the longstanding campers in the Joe Paterno is an untrustworthy tool camp... welcome. We've been building the foundations up for a while...

Big and Bad

I want to be positive about my Sixers, I really do. And then things like this last week happens, and I wonder what the point is, really...

Item 1: Amnesty for Elton Brand.

Now, in and of itself, getting out of EB's contract, and away from a 33-year-old 6'-9" F/C is something of a benefit. Brand's best offensive move is a mid-range jumper that doesn't go down often enough to justify more than 8 to 10 shots per game, and while he's an effective shot blocker and willing defender, that doesn't exactly make him a shutdown guy, or someone deserving a big deal. He tries real hard, plays pretty smart and will move the ball on offense, but all of that seems like something you should be able to find in freely available talent and/or coach up out of your younger guys, especially when your best on the court asset seems to be the coach that gets similar and better work out of your young bigs. Brand's departure should also give us all the final opportunity we need to determine why Thad Young shouldn't start, and that's probably all to the good, too.

But still, it rankles to lose a rotation guy for no better reason than he made too much money, rather than, you know, an actual basketball decision. If Brand is your worst starter or your first big off the bench, you might have a very good team, and in the right situation (Miami?), he could easily have gotten a ring and been overrated for his contributions. The only thing that keeps Brand from being as beloved as a Nick Collison or a Udonis Haslem by his local fan base is his pre-injury monster contract, paid out when he was a top 10 option who had just dragged a Clippers team deep into the playoffs after a Sisyphean slog. Usually, it's the Clippers' big FA signings that get hurt, rather than the other way around.

As Brand is healthy now, he was fast fodder on the amnesty wire, with the curious choice of Dallas gobbling him up. On a team that suddenly doesn't have Jason Kidd, Brand is going to lack for consistent touches next to Dirk Nowitzki, and have to make the more than wide open looks he's going to get. He'll help them reach another playoff, but he won't help them avoid another first round exit, and since he comes off the books in 2013, he won't hurt their doomed attempts to bring in a big FA signing of their own.

In and of itself, getting away from EB's contract and giving away value is sour but understandable... until word comes out today that the club has

Item #2: Imported vagabond C and eternal Michael Jordan draft-whiff Kwame Brown to town.

Good grief.

With Brown, the Sixers have a total savant platoon to ride with Spencer Hawes, and yet another reason to wonder whether the front office is on something that isn't prescribed by a reputable physician. Brown's developed a reputation as a defensive stopper in the past few years, mostly because he's (a) still in the league for some reason, (b) athletic enough to be a blown pick so many years ago, and (c) fairly enthusiastic about committing fouls.

But the problem with having him in your rotation is that basketball does not allow for subs on the fly. Brown has to play half of the time on offense, the same way that Hawes has to spend half of his time on defense. We're also all assuming that Kwame is healthy after his latest flameout in Golden State, and that if he is healthy, that he's retained enough of that trademark athleticism to hold some value on defense.

Let's ignore the lifetime of poor play. Or, well, not. Brown being any use at all... is not a really good bet.

But what *is* a really good bet is this: Lavoy Allen will lose minutes to Brown. So will Nicola Vuvevic, who had more than a few moments of promise last year in his rookie campaign. Arnett Moultrie, the #1 pick that they gave up future considerations to the Heat for, just saw his likely minutes go down, maybe all the way to the D League.

And while none of those guys is assured to have a better or longer career than Brown or Hawes, they all offer more in the way of potential. Brown's is long gone, and Hawes' visible lack of heart tells you all you need to know about his future, and the future of any team that gives him minutes.

I don't know if any team in the Association is better off having Brown around, let alone one that needs to develop star-level talent out of their bench guys to have any real chance of replicating last year's Final 8 finish. And there's also this: if the team really thinks that the town's basketball fans are going to give Kwame a long leash, they are smoking something. Something good.

So, um, welcome to town, Kwame. Rent, don't buy. See if you can coach up Allen and Vook to make your stay short and restful. And if you do all of that, I'll be happy to consider you an upgrade over Tony Battie for the role of big man who never plays, and get on board for your post-career future as a rah-rah assistant coach and instructor.

Jordan will overpay you for all of that, right?

FTT Off-Topic: America, I'm Sorry

So for the last four days, I've been working the day job in the middle of America. Adding to the trip's, um, merits is the fact that the hotel's wifi has combined the strength of a butterfly with, well, the concentration of a butterfly. I'm clearly down on butterflies this week. Add my post-40 nature, need to be sharp in a new office and overall loneliness without the wife and kids, and it's been a pretty work-intensive week. But, well, so be it. I don't travel for business very often, and there are worse things than living on an expense account.

But then, there's this: four days without sports, because the All Star Game barely qualifies as sports. A Dish TV fight on networks that has made multiple channels on the hotel cable system go away. And so, for the first time in something like decades...

I'm channel surfing through mass market American television.

Folks, tell me something.

When did it mainstream TV just give up?

Either it's a talent show that should cause your spine to constrict in sheer embarrassment with being a mammal like them other mammals on the television... or it's a fake documentary that's devoid of anything relating to actual honest humn life... or it's a not funny fake documentary comedy show... or a train wreck obstacle course. That last one was actually the closest thing to entertainment, in that I got to watch terrible people get hurt. And I suppose I should just be happy that it made me get up and go work out of sheer indifference and boredom, and that it's all a good thing, since it means that I won' t ever be tempted to waste my time in this way again...

But good grief. This is really what passes for entertainment these days?

Top 10 takeaways from the Dwight Howard trade talks

10) According to insiders, Howard is going to to be the first player in NBA history to play for a half dozen teams at once

9) Shockingly, none of the teams that are interested in him seem too worried about his back problem, which basically means they are all OK with mortgaging their teams to get a guy that quit on his longtime teammates

8) You have to admire how much Howard is committed to driving down his trade value before leaving

7) It's a little known rule that all trades in the NBA have to happen by early July, or they totally don't count

6) When you'd rather sign brittle non-rebounding Brook Lopez, that's kind of saying something

5) On some level, you kind of hope that the Magic trade him to the Bobcats, just as an object lesson to other superstars that try to pick their team without being free agents

4) Orlando would have probably already traded him to the Lakers if it weren't for their past history of sending big men to LA

3) There's no truth to the rumor that Orlando is trying very hard to send him to Portland or Houston, just to make sure he gets brutally hurt

2) If you're not sick of this story by now, thanks for reading the blog, Mr. Howard

1) As soon as a trade gets down, no matter what gets given up, the team that acquires him will see its odds of winning the title drop in Vegas