Archive For The “Big 10” Category

Paterno Apologists Try To Attack Fictional Portrayal In Movie With Fiction Of Their Own

By |

Paterno Apologists Try To Attack Fictional Portrayal In Movie With Fiction Of Their Own

This weekend, HBO premiered the movie Paterno, a fictional representation of the two weeks covering the span of time between Joe Paterno’s 409th career game and his lung cancer diagnosis.

I watched the movie, curious to see how Barry Levinson would portray the events, and how Al Pacino and a litany of really great actors would put the whole thing together.

The movie had a Shakespearean quality to it, trying to make an interesting case study of Joe Paterno and an examination of two fateful weeks.  Like many movies, it took actual events, and the writers formed a narrative around it – much like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar wasn’t based on the actual conversations between Marcus Brutus and Cassius.

Predictably, in their response to the movie, the Paterno family chose to attack the movie’s credibility.

“The HBO movie regarding Joe Paterno is a fictionalized portrayal of the tragic events surrounding Jerry Sandusky’s crimes. Numerous scenes, events and dialogue bear no resemblance to what actually transpired,” Scott Paterno thundered in a public statement just prior to the movie’s release on Saturday.

For good measure, the family also pushed their own commissioned report on the scandal – a weak, broad characterization of the profile of child molesters.  The report, which has been floated before, is another attempt to try to convince people to believe that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled everybody, which conveniently absolves everyone from blame – especially Joe Paterno.

Their attacks on the credibility of the movie are reprehensible and are yet another attempt by Paterno apologists to try to deny that anything was wrong with their father or the institutional structure at Penn State when their father was head coach there.

In effect, they are trying to replace the fictional portrayal of Paterno in the movie with their own fictional representation of Joe.
Read more »

Read more »

Paterno Apologists Try To Attack Fictional Portrayal In Movie With Fiction Of Their Own

By |

Paterno Apologists Try To Attack Fictional Portrayal In Movie With Fiction Of Their Own

This weekend, HBO premiered the movie Paterno, a fictional representation of the two weeks covering the span of time between Joe Paterno’s 409th career game and his lung cancer diagnosis.

I watched the movie, curious to see how Barry Levinson would portray the events, and how Al Pacino and a litany of really great actors would put the whole thing together.

The movie had a Shakespearean quality to it, trying to make an interesting case study of Joe Paterno and an examination of two fateful weeks.  Like many movies, it took actual events, and the writers formed a narrative around it – much like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar wasn’t based on the actual conversations between Marcus Brutus and Cassius.

Predictably, in their response to the movie, the Paterno family chose to attack the movie’s credibility.

“The HBO movie regarding Joe Paterno is a fictionalized portrayal of the tragic events surrounding Jerry Sandusky’s crimes. Numerous scenes, events and dialogue bear no resemblance to what actually transpired,” Scott Paterno thundered in a public statement just prior to the movie’s release on Saturday.

For good measure, the family also pushed their own commissioned report on the scandal – a weak, broad characterization of the profile of child molesters.  The report, which has been floated before, is another attempt to try to convince people to believe that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled everybody, which conveniently absolves everyone from blame – especially Joe Paterno.

Their attacks on the credibility of the movie are reprehensible and are yet another attempt by Paterno apologists to try to deny that anything was wrong with their father or the institutional structure at Penn State when their father was head coach there.

In effect, they are trying to replace the fictional portrayal of Paterno in the movie with their own fictional representation of Joe.
Read more »

Read more »

Penn State Focus Shouldn’t Only Be Paterno, But How Sex Crimes Were Handled At Penn State Overall

By |

Penn State Focus Shouldn’t Only Be Paterno, But How Sex Crimes Were Handled At Penn State Overall
In the news last week came, essentially, four new claims of abuse that happened at the hands of Gerald Sandusky while he employed as a linebackers coach at Penn State.

All are, at a bare minimum, troubling, and they invite the question “who knew what, and when” in terms of these allegations.

Three of the allegations, however, are worthy of further examination because they could demonstrate that the administrators at the time, which would include former athletic directors Ed Czekaj and Jim Tarman, violated the law.

It also could eventually – though nothing has surfaced yet – implicate Joe Paterno.

With the very important caveat being we don’t know everything, we do seem to have enough to bring some context to the goings-on inside Penn State’s athletic department during the last 40 years.  The only clear fact was that child sex allegations weren’t handled with the respect they deserved.
Read more »

Read more »

Sandusky/Paterno Timeline Keeps Getting More Difficult To Ignore

By |

Sandusky/Paterno Timeline Keeps Getting More Difficult To Ignore

The crimes committed by Gerald Sandusky continue to be a band-aid that is re-applied, and continuously ripped off, the arms of those of love Penn State.

Already convicted by a court of law, Sandusky has what is effectively a life sentence, while others who were in power at Penn State during the 1998 period where sex crimes were reported internally, Graham Spanier, Gary Schulz and Tim Curley, have still not faced any sort of trial and are still at-large today.

Last week, with an interesting sentence appearing deep in an insurance lawsuit involving a Sandusky victim settlement, the band-aid was once again ripped off.

The details of the lawsuit claim that Joe Paterno chose not to act in 1976 when one victim reported abuse by Sandusky, while Sarah Ganim, the hero reporter who broke the Sandusky story wide-open five years ago, added a second story of abuse in the 1970s where Paterno pressured one of Sandusky’s victims over the phone in the 1971 to not press charges against him.

Penn State folks doggedly and consistently appear to deny that Paterno had anything to do with Sandusky, with the Paterno family themselves on the leading edge of of the denials.

As you’ll discover below, these denials are becoming less and less plausible by the second.
Read more »

Read more »

All Everyone Wants In The FCS Is A Shot On A Big Stage

By |

All Everyone Wants In The FCS Is A Shot On A Big Stage

Like many Division I football programs, Lehigh started their preparations for the upcoming Patriot Football season last Thursday.

If you had to list the desires of the football team going into the preseason, chief among them is eradicating the memory of last season, whether it was the 3-8 record or especially the final game of last year.

But what I think really gets the Lehigh players going, and in fact what gets most players going at FCS schools, is that they get a shot at something truly special.

For Lehigh players, it means they can get a shot at taking down a nationally-ranked team, James Madison, in their own house, a shot at returning a Patriot League Championship trophy to Grace Hall, a shot at turning things around against Lafayette, and a shot at winning a national championship against the best schools of their subdivision.

It’s a time of optimism for all FCS schools, but it’s the shot that truly makes it special.

And if there’s one thing I fear more about the future of college football than anything else, it’s when schools remove opportunities to give schools a shot at something special.

Read more »

Read more »

Skip to toolbar