Sports Opinion: Whiny Valley

Instead of protesting the selection of Bill O’Brien to coach Penn State football, the diehards ought to look at it this way:

There could have been no football games in so-called Happy Valley next autumn – that is to say, the major activity of that entire university could have been cancelled.

Some Penn State football boosters and former players are said to be unhappy with the choice of O’Brien in the wake of the ghastly sexual abuse scandal emanating from the core of the football program.

This is a good time to think about the absurd scale of values of college football, while Louisiana State University and Alabama are meeting for the national championship in New Orleans on Monday night.

Penn State is part of that feeder system of the Bowl Championship Series. The belief that Penn State should be a contender in any given season is a direct cause of the institutional blindness that sheltered an alleged abuser of boys, a trusted former assistant coach named Jerry Sandusky.

Nobody wanted to know, including the long-time coach and icon, Joe Paterno, whose ideals and generosity were used to rationalize more corrupt programs at other schools. 

Hansen Alexander, a lawyer and writer in New York, makes the case that the lying and payoffs at schools like Ohio State and Miami were even more institutional than the sexual scandal that nobody at Penn State wanted to uncover.

Writers like Joe Nocera and Dave Zirin have pointed out the hypocrisies and dishonesties of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Bowl Championship Series and individual schools.

Over the years, I have asked college presidents to explain the link between football and education. The best they can do is gush about getting hordes of people on their campus in the fall. Apparently, when the recruits win a football game, boosters can be cajoled into giving money for laboratories. What a pathetic bargain that is.

Penn State is now being treated as a rogue institution that could not respond to danger signs from within. Of course, life and education must go on, for the sake of the students and the community.

In the wake of scandal, the new administration of Penn State could have apologized to rival schools and television networks and other enablers of this system, and just cancelled all games. Instead, the administrators went out and found a coach with excellent references and they seem committed to competing for future B.C.S. titles.

I would say Penn State fans ought to stop yapping about the new coach. The whole sordid system got off easy.