@MarkMaddenX: Don't believe this can get worse? Give it 72 hrs. People really digging into Second Mile. Even more shocking revelation is ahead. Yikes.
Crazy shit! And here I was thinking we take sport too seriously here!
Sandusky is married and has six adopted children. He also took in foster children.
I wonder what his wife has to say about any of this.
This really has nothing to do with sport.
Crazy shit! And here I was thinking we take sport too seriously here!
This really has nothing to do with sport.
This is not about sport. This is about a community, my community, that has convinced itself that it's better than every other community. It's a microcosm of jingoism. It's got nothing to do with Paterno the football coach. It's got everything to do with "we are Penn State and no one else can understand what he means to us."I'm going to have to disagree and say that this has everything to do with sport - specifically the ridiculous degree of importance that we as a society place upon it. Had these allegations been leveled at even the most prominent professor on campus, that individual would have been disciplined immediately; because the allegations involved the precious football program, however, all channels of the school were content to ignore the problem for over a decade. Universities with major sports programs consistently bow to the interests of their players, coaches, and boosters, which only serves to reinforce the attitude of entitlement and sense of being above the law that are already so heavily pronounced among those groups.
As these riots show, to me at least, sports fanaticism is able completely and utterly to destroy any semblance of logic, empathy, and, often, basic human decency. We as a culture need seriously to reevaluate the reverence with which we hold college and pro sports. This whole affair, but especially the pro-Paterno riots last night, is among the most reprehensible things that I have ever witnessed.
This is not about sport. This is about a community, my community, that has convinced itself that it's better than every other community. It's a microcosm of jingoism. It's got nothing to do with Paterno the football coach. It's got everything to do with "we are Penn State and no one else can understand what he means to us."
In April, Pittsburgh radio host Mark Madden wrote a story revealing Penn State for much of the cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's alleged child rape that has been exposed in the past week. While it didn't raise many eyebrows back then, six months later it looks to be incredibly accurate.
On Thursday morning, just hours after legendary head coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier were fired by the school's board of trustees, Madden was asked on The Dennis and Callahan Show what he believes the next piece of news will be.
What he said was twice as shocking as anything that's been released thus far.
"I can give you a rumor and I can give you something I think might happen," Madden told John Dennis and Gerry Callahan. "I hear there's a rumor that there will be a more shocking development from the Second Mile Foundation -- and hold on to your stomachs, boys, this is gross, I will use the only language I can -- that Jerry Sandusky and Second Mile were pimping out young boys to rich donors. That was being investigated by two prominent columnists even as I speak."
After the news spread, Madden later explained via Twitter why he went public with the rumors.
"I normally abhor giving RUMORS credence," Madden wrote. "But whole Sandusky scandal started out as a RUMOR. It gets deeper and more disgusting all the time. One of state's top columnists investigating. That adds credence. I am NOT rumor's original source. [Why does] Sandusky deserve benefit of doubt?"
Madden also spoke more definitively on Dennis and Callahan to the cover-up efforts at the school and beyond that he expects will be made public soon.
"The other thing I think that may eventually become uncovered, and I talked about this in my original article back in April, is that I think they'll find out that Jerry Sandusky was told that he had to retire in exchange for a cover-up," Madden said. "If you look at the timeline, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
"My opinion is when Sandusky quit, everybody knew -- not just at Penn State," Madden added. "I think it was a very poorly kept secret about college football in general, and that is why he never coached in college football again and retired at the relatively young age of 55. [That's] young for a coach, certainly."
I respect your opinion, as you are right in the middle of everything, but the only question I would pose in response to the idea that it's not about football is this: why are the students rioting on behalf of Paterno and not on behalf of the ousted president? I would think that, if Penn State is anything like Wisconsin, football forms a substantial part of the school's identity. Sports infiltrate every aspect of social and cultural life at these schools.
And, again, I would argue strongly that the only reason that the sordid deeds were covered up for so long is because they occurred within the football program. Had they occurred anywhere else in the school, swift, decisive action would have been taken.
Without commenting on whether or not that could be true (obviously anything could be true at this point), Madden is a piece of shit who has frequently made things up.
this isn't about sports. this is about power.
The problem is that this is not the discussion. Basically, there's one narrative: "Joe should not have been fired, but the riots were unnecessary and made us look bad." No one is saying, "Maybe our support of Paterno is what's making us look bad." No one.And, finally, I'm not impugning the entire Penn State community by any means. But those who were involved in these ridiculous pro-Paterno rallies deserve to be exposed as the ignorami that they are.