On The Week's Top Five

1. Trump

I do not profess to understand this phenomenon, or what it might mean for Republican politics. I do know that if Donald Trump runs for president, it will be incredibly entertaining, in the way Hank's Look-Around Cafe was entertaining. Here is what I know: Among other things, Donald Trump's rampant egotism once murdered a second-tier professional football league. If the Houston Gamblers still existed, perhaps I would see a reason to take him seriously.

2. Manny

Back when I was a cub reporter in Akron, I wrote a long profile of Manny Ramirez, in which I discovered that when the O.J. Bronco chase took place, Manny thought people were talking about his teammate Chad Ogea. Manny misplaced uncashed paychecks in his locker; he left stacks of hundreds in the glove compartment of his car. I realize nothing is certain, but I don't think Manny took steroids back then because Manny did not need steroids back then, and Manny only took what he needed. I think, as he got older, as he came to realize that he could not live in a state suspended adolescence, he probably panicked and turned to artificial methods. But I think it's ridiculous to disquality him for the Hall of Fame because of this. If nothing else, Manny wasn't savvy enough to do these things without getting caught, and since we seem to condemn the guile behind steroid use more than the actual steroid use, that should count for something.  

3. The F Word

I have meticulously detailed the ignominious history of Penn State basketball on this blog. I admit that there is little to be proud of, save a flukish NCAA tournament victory approximately once every two presidential cycles. But there is a prominent exception to that rule. His name is John Amaechi. He played center back when I covered the team in the early 1990s, and he remains one of the most perceptive and likeable athletes I've ever interviewed. He also happens to A.) Have played several largely unremarkable years in the NBA,  and B.) Be gay, which is how he's become one of the most prominent--one of the only, for that matter--voices speaking up for the gay athlete in the big three American sports. Amaechi wrote an excellent and eminently reasonable piece for The New York Times about Kobe Bryant's use of a gay slur here. Though I fear that what Kobe's outburst signals most of all is that while there is certainly more societal condemnation of homophobia than ever before, we are nowhere near the point where an NBA, NFL, or MLB player will feel comfortable enough to out himself while still active in the league.

4. Frontline

Any neanderthal who doesn't believe PBS contributes to the public good probably wouldn't appreciate this show in the first place, but I happen to believe it produces some of the best journalism anywhere, as it did with this week's program about the perils of high-school football. It's a show that manages to frame issues in a unique and accessible way. And its narrator has one of the five greatest voices in television.

5. David Grann


Seriously. This story is amazing. 

On The Long and Illustrious History of Penn State Basketball, Part III

Forgive me if this post is disjointed, but I'm a little frazzled. I've written before about my irrational loyalty to the perpetually lost cause known as Penn State basketball,* but every so often they reward my patience. Once every decade, a team emerges from out of nowhere, like this one did, and just when you think they're going to fall away into the historical oblivion of the NIT they pull some kind of irrational stunt. Granted, it was perhaps the ugliest miracle you'll ever see, four straight days of teeth-pulling, gear-grinding Big Ten tournament basketball, four days of the best player in Penn State history struggling for every single shot he took, four days of the basketball establishment continually casting doubts on a team that probably deserved quite a bit of that doubt after losing to Maine in December.**

But every so often, whether by pure chance or pure will or pure want, this happens. And it is a great feeling, a joy that is rare and unique and exhilarating and exhausting. I don't permit myself many pure sporting pleasures, due partly to my job and due partly to a veil of skepticism that keeps thickening with age, but Penn State basketball is one of the last unfettered allegiances of my existence. Because they are always underdogs, a school without a true recruiting base, a school so devoid of tradition that you get the feeling they wouldn't even know how to cheat effectively even if they wanted to, a school with five very good starting players and absolutely no bench at all***, a school that doesn't even have a true practice facility, a school with so much working against that it's a miracle they ever find a way to compete in the Big Ten.

Sometimes makes me angry that it has to be that way, but it's the truth, and I don't know if they'll ever find their way to a higher plane. As I've said before, I kind of hope they don't. There was something hyperkinetic about watching those wins over Wisconsin and Michigan State, as sluggish as they appeared to an impartial observer. Because Penn State has no real bench, because their margin of error is so slim, because Talor Battle--and I was convinced Battle was going to become the greatest college basketball player to go four years without ever appearing in an NCAA tournament--plays forty minutes game after game, because every defensive stop is key, because a forward named Jeff Brooks has suddenly found himself, because you feel the urgency with every possession, watching this team somehow win games has been one of the great joys in my increasingly segmented life as a sports fan.

And so now I shouldn't really care what happens. But I will. I will sweat every posession against Temple, and I will spout irrational thoughts, and whenever it is over, against Temple or San Diego State or Duke or whoever, I will feel a distinct sense of sadness. Because it is not often that something so raggedly beautiful unfolds before your eyes.

*And if you arrived here because of either of those posts, you should probably read this, by the always insightful Dave Jones.
**I've never paid much attention to announcer bias. When I was kid, my parents would throw parties to watch Penn State games, and we would listen to Frank Broyles, who was an unapologetic SEC guy through-and-through, and the word was that Frank Broyles hated Penn State. I have no idea if this was true, and even if it was true...who cares? But it was rather strange to watch two days of Big Ten tournament coverage on CBS, because it was clear no one on that broadcast team expected Penn State to be playing in any of those games, and no one on that broadcast team was willing to even accept the fact that Penn State had a better case for an NCAA tournament bid than Michigan State. Clark Kellogg maintained this stance even after Penn State defeated Michigan State. And I generally like Clark Kellogg quite a bit. But his refusal to acknowledge statistics was mind-boggling.
***There is one player who comes off the bench for Penn State--and I shall not name names--who at times appears so utterly befuddled and physically overmatched that his play reminds me of the old days, when Penn State would recruit big kids from rural Pennsylvania who would have otherwise wound up at Lock Haven State just to fill their scholarship quota. At one point during the Big Ten tournament, this kid was on the floor with a walk-on whose primary job is to fill space. And somehow, through sheer force of effort, Penn State won anyway.

On The Long and Illustrious History of Penn State Basketball, Part II

I don't have children, and I don't know that I ever will have children, but if I did, I would wish one thing upon them: That they not be born into royalty. I am speaking metaphorically, of course, unless you happen to be a member of the British royal family, in which case you probably do not seek advice on child-rearing from obscure blogspot outposts. I am speaking of sports*, and specifically, of rooting interests, because I find that many of the most interesting people I know did not grow up enamored of teams who enjoyed a particular amount of success.** Every child with literary aspirations should bear an allegiance to at least one franchise/program for which there is little to no hope; it is what builds us as human beings. Losing, to me, will always be more interesting than winning, which is why Cleveland is the most interesting city in America that no one actually wants to be associated with.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this lately. I've been thinking about this because I've been watching a number of Penn State basketball games, a yearly exercise in a futility and frustration that I've written about before--but it's worth revisiting, because Penn State is in the midst of a somewhat remarkable stretch of moderate success and near success that ultimately seems destined to add up to failure. Here are the scores of Penn State's last four games, all against Top 25 teams:

Michigan State W 66-62
Illinois W 57-55
at Ohio State L 69-66
at Purdue L 63-62

This is pretty much the epitome of fifty years of Penn State basketball***: Every time they begin to show promise, they fall short. Every time you think perhaps they're about to leap to a new plateau of success, they fall backward. I can't imagine any team in the country has played harder than Penn State in those last four games, but in the end, what the hell does that matter? They lost to Ohio State on a last-second shot; they lost to Purdue after a terrible out-of-bounds call and a last-second shot. They are now 10-8, and 3-4 in the Big Ten, and because they somehow lost a home game to Maine during their non-conference slate, they will have to run the table at the Big Ten tournament in order to qualify for the NCAA tournament's field of sixty-eight. They are thisclose, and yet not close at all.

On An Anniversary Worth Noting

Yesterday marked 24 years since the most overtly theatrical and baldly dramatic game in college football history.* Unfortunately, Penn State marked this anniversary by enduring (potentially) one of the program's most ignominious weekends in recent memory.

I prefer to remember the good times.


Two decades later, and the real world has been kind to the quarterback, even if no one can remember his name. He lives in what can only be described as a sprawling manifestation of the American dream, an enormous stucco house on a tree-lined cul-de-sac in a tony New Jersey suburb. He has a wife, and he has four children, and he has a den with a wet bar and a pool table, and until recently, when corporate restructuring rendered him a temporary stay-at-home father, he had spent 18 years as a star at Merrill Lynch. 

John Shaffer. The name, like the way he played quarterback, is bland and forgettable, which is why few people outside of the state of Pennsylvania even recall it anymore. When he graduated from Penn State as an academic All-American in the spring of 1987, he had a national championship ring and a reputation as a solid citizen who had no legitimate shot of making it in the National Football League. He went to training camp with the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent. By the end of August, he did something that many football players could never muster the courage to do: He asked to be cut. He had a degree in finance, with an internship waiting on Wall Street. He had another life to start.

Read the rest of the story here. Read lots more here.

*This is a matter of opinion. But in this case, given the research, my opinion is unquestionably correct.

On Blair Thomas, Greg Oden, and Level of Bustitude

He stopped short, dropping his arms. "I..." he said, gasping a little, though his condition was fine and the run hadn't winded him. "I--once I played here."
--Irwin Shaw, The Eighty Yard Run


In my mind, Blair Thomas is not a punchline. In my mind, Blair Thomas is not a bust. In my mind, Blair Thomas is the running back in this video, the running back who, at the 6:25 mark, propels himself through the Syracuse defensive line and then bursts past five defenders for one of the most picturesque 92-yard runs you will ever see. In my mind, Blair Thomas is the running back who took his next carry forty yards for another touchdown, and finished the day with144 yards on three carries, announcing his presence in a way I've never seen a young running back do before or since. In my mind, Blair Thomas was a first-tier talent who tore up his knee before his senior season and never regained the same burst; I was a teenager who never played football and even I recognized that the Blair Thomas of 1989 was not the Blair Thomas of 1986. It is not his fault that the Jets were too inept to realize this; it is not his fault that the Jets overvalued him.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons: First, Jeff Pearlman, in compiling a list of the 100 Worst Players in NFL history on Deadspin, cited Thomas in his introduction. Not as one of the worst players in the NFL history, but as a "larger-than-large bust." Now, let's leave aside the fact that I can find no citation of Joe Paterno actually calling Thomas "the best player I've ever coached" (he did call Thomas the best all-around running back he'd coached, a relatively major distinction given the defensive stars who have come through Penn State's program); let's just ask the larger existential question that hovers over Pearlman's rankings (which are generally a goofy and well-rendered conceit): What is a bust? How do we determine a bust? Shouldn't mitigating circumstances be factored in?

Now, it is true that Blair Thomas did not live up to expectations. And so perhaps, at some level, at least in the minds of Jets fans, this makes him a colossal bust. In my mind, if you had to measure Level of Bustitude*, it is fair to rank Thomas higher on the scale than, say, poor Ki-Jana Carter, who may have actually been the greatest running back of the Paterno era but never could stay healthy when he reached the NFL. (Thomas might be 7; Carter is probably a 2 or 3.) The problem is, we don't make these distinctions. The problem is that there is no nuance in the classification of a bust; there is no measure of injuries and the mental burden of fame and the attendant pressure that may affect certain personalities in different ways than others.  And that brings us to Greg Oden.

Oden's career, of course, has been a story of failure. His body is flawed; his body has betrayed him, over and over again. This happens, but when it happens to an athlete like Oden, it somehow becomes his fault. In a matter of time, Oden will be inexorably connected to Ryan Leaf, even though the individual circumstances of their Bustitude could not be more different. This is not fair, but this is sports, and in sports, we never really consider the notion that the human body is a fickle and undependable instrument. Failure is failure, and Greg Oden is not possessed of the health and/or talent of Kevin Durant, with whom he will forever be compared (see Leaf: Manning). The circumstances are irrelevant, and the past matters to no one but ourselves.

*TM

On 400

Shortly after Joe Paterno won the four hundredth game of his career, the scores of each of his victories began scrolling across the Jumbotron at Beaver Stadium. There were so many, rendered in such small type, that it was nearly impossible to read them from afar. And even then, it seemed like it might never end, like Paterno might not make it until the end of his own C.V. before bedtime.

I was standing in Section WG, Row E, in the same cramped metal bleachers from which I'd intermittently watched Joe Paterno coach for more than thirty years. I was there purely by chance, but I'm glad I was, because I realize it's going to end soon. That, for me, is the part that's most difficult to deal with; there are few things in life that last so long they seem like they'll never change. Joe Paterno is one of those things. But that night, there was a feeling that this was it, that at some point in the near future, Paterno will simply fade away, and that this was the last celebration* he will allow himself to indulge in. 

I won't sit here and spout platitudes; there are times when I think the cult of personality that surrounds Paterno is too overbearing. Maybe you think Joe Paterno is a self-righteous boor. Maybe you think his career has become one long octogenarian joke. Maybe you think all those years of beating up on East Coast weaklings render his records meaningless. That's your right. But what continues to strike me is that Paterno's uniqueness lies in his deft ability to tie his legacy to something more than the sport in which he coached.

One more thing: There's something ironic in the fact that all of this celebration of Paterno centers around the fact that no one can ever replicate what he did. Because one of the tenets of Paterno's Grand Experiment was that his program would set an example for all the others, that the marriage of academia and athletics was not an untenable proposition. And forty years later, we seem to be acknowledging that it is untenable. Which, if it's true, means that one of the two greatest coaches in the history of college football succeeded in impacting his university in unprecedented ways, but could not succeed in changing the way we view modern college athletics. Which means the Grand Experiment was an unqualified success, but it exists in a vacuum.

*Is there anything more lovely than Paterno beginning his 45 second victory speech by acknowledging the fact that most of the people in that stadium were thinking as much about the traffic in the parking lots as they were about the content of his address? How many other major college coaches would be able to separate themselves from their ego, if only for that moment, and acknowledge his audience's concerns about returning to the remote corners of the state from whence they came? In all, on what was supposed to be a celebration about him, Paterno spoke for less time than both Penn State's athletic director and Penn State's president.

(Photo: Centre Daily Times)

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Promotional Notes

ESPN Chicago ran an excerpt of Bigger Than the Game, as part of their '85 Bears commemoration. Also, Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News quoted my book in evoking comparisons between the Alex Smith-Singletary confrontation and the back and forth between Ditka and Jim McMahon (see Chap. I, Section II, which you can read online or on a Kindle for free).

2. Knee-Jerk Contrarianism, Part I

I credit Dave Jones of the Patriot-News for his provocativeness, but to me, this proposition is the equivalent of randomly altering the punctuation in The Sun Also Rises. Some of us happen to like 1950s milk bottles, Mr. Jones. We don't need silver, and we don't need additional swooshes (the blasphemy of adding one to the greatest outfit in sports was egregious enough), and those Nike combat uniforms (above) look like Phil Knight conjured them during a fever dream. The only acceptable addition to Penn State's uniforms would be to add back the numbers on the helmets, as it was pre-1974. Sometimes, old and staid is the best possibility of all.

3. Knee-Jerk, Contrarianism, Part II

I could take issue with many of the points Slate's Jack Shafer makes about the media criticizing athletes for hanging on too long (and I even agree a few things he says), but when he says Michael Jordan's years with the Wizards were "great and meaningful," he loses me for good. Somebody might want to send him a copy of this book.

On the Backup Quarterback

My first intimate experience with the allure of the backup quarterback came in the Fall of 1979. The starter for Penn State that year was Dayle Tate, a promising prospect who stepped into the role at the worst possible moment--the season before, Penn State had lost the national championship game to Alabama, 14-7, on New Year's Day, on a goal-line stand that would hang over the program for several years afterward. Tate's predecessor at the position was Chuck Fusina, whose merits have previously been documented on this very blog; his successor, after a year of torment and mediocrity, would be Todd Blackledge. In the 1979 Penn State football press guide, Dayle Tate is wearing a plaid sportjacket; while I'm sure this jacket was perfectly fashionable during the Carter Administration, I now subconsciously connote plaid sportjackets with failure, and I associate Dayle Tate with the first shower of boos I ever witnessed in person at a sporting event.

None of that season was particularly the fault of Dayle Tate. In 1979, Penn State went 8-4, which is a considerably better record than what they will likely finish with this season. They finished their season with a 9-6 victory over Tulane in the Liberty Bowl.* And it's true Dayle Tate's numbers are not particularly great--he completed 52 percent of his passes and threw eight touchdowns and 11 interceptions--and it's true Tate's backup was a freshman named Jeff Hostetler, who would wind up transferring to West Virginia and then winning a Super Bowl, but really, most of this wasn't Dayle Tate's fault. Penn State lost to four teams that Fall, and gave up an average of 31 points in those four games; when Hostetler did step in during the final regular season game against Pittsburgh, he went 6-for-16 with 72 yards and an interception.**

But this is not about rationality. This is about the essentially irrationality of sports fans, and nothing epitomizes this notion quite like the obsession with the backup quarterback. It happens every year, in cities and towns across America. It's happening now at Penn State, where a true freshman named Rob Bolden--clearly Penn State's best option at a quarterback position where none of the candidates have any real experience--has been tasked with holding together a team with an injury-riddled defense and an offensive line that would have trouble run blocking against a tigerless Siegfried and Roy.***It's happening perpetually in Philadelphia, where Kevin Kolb supplanted Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick supplanted Kevin Kolb who supplanted Michael Vick, and now Eagles fans are so confused they no longer know who to boo. And it happened most startlingly last night in San Francisco, where Alex Smith, the designated scapegoat for a team that's managed to lose games in every possible way, was booed so loudly that I half-expected to see him wear a plaid sportcoat to the postgame press conference. And who did San Francisco fans want to replace him with? David Carr, who, in his final year as a starter, four years ago, threw 11 touchdowns and 12 interceptions.****

Over at Deadspin, Barry Petchesky called it "The Single Saddest Moment of the NFL Season." And yet, at some level, it was also entirely predictable. Because the backup quarterback is a channel for all the fury and irrationality and egotism and certitude of the American sports fan. Because the backup quarterback represents hope when all hope is lost, an altered future when the future promises nothing but bleakness. Even if he's not as good, he's still better. It's a story that will never change, even when it doesn't make much sense.

*Which, with the exception of an option pass by an Afro'ed halfback named Joel Coles, was one of the more atrocious football games I have ever seen. 
**Pitt's quarterback was 17-of-32 for 279 yards. His name was Moreno. Or Marino. Or something. I believe he now spends his Sundays in a well-lit room laughing at unfunny jokes.
***I'm not sure if that metaphor makes any sense, but it's Monday, and this is my blog. So just go with me.

****On a side note, I think the implosion of the 49ers is one of the more intriguing stories in what's become a truly weird NFL season. Mike Singletary berating Smith on the sideline last night kind of felt like a Ditka v. McMahon moment.

On Penn State vs. Alabama

It's not my first memory, but in some ways, it might as well be. New Year's Day, 1978: I'm five years old, and Penn State is playing Alabama for the national championship. I recall the room and its fireplace and its unsightly brown carpet, and I recall the faltering RCA television, and I recall the tumult among the adults inside when Penn State fails to convert on four downs from the goal line, and Alabama wins the game. I recall the retreat to the backyard of our house on Devonshire Drive, to construct a revisionist history of the scene with my friend Scott Holderman.*

There's a telling story in Joe Paterno's autobiography in which he discusses one of his first meetings with Bear Bryant. It takes place at a football banquet, and Bear urges Paterno to demand an outrageous sum of money, to demand a five-year contract with a rollover clause, to demand a car and a golf club membership and to demand two hundred tickets for each game, which he could then dole out as he saw fit, thereby turning those tickets in a power proposition. This was the how the Bear worked; for better or worse, he was a southern politician, leveraging favors for power. And Paterno was a completely different animal. It was, Paterno said, not a difference in scruples, but a difference in style.   

I bring this up because Penn State plays Alabama again this Saturday, in a game weighted with history. Back in the 1970s and on into the 1980s, the Penn State-Alabama rivalry was epic. It was Red versus Blue before Red versus Blue existed. For years, Eastern football was considered a second-class product--and Penn State was the Boise State of its era--until Paterno began defeating schools like Alabama. Even now, it feels like something of a metaphor for American regionalism; even now, it feels like Penn State represents the progressive culture of the Northeast, and Alabama represents the reactionary politics of the South, and those four downs at the goal line in '78 were something of a last stand for the old ways of American politics.

That's a gross oversimplification, I know, and probably riddled with holes, but that's how my brain works. I remember things the way I want to remember them. At some level, all history is revisionist. In my mind, Paterno calls the play-action pass he actually wanted to call on fourth down before losing his nerve, and Penn State pulls off a miraculous victory, the same kind of victory the kid in me somehow hopes, against all hope, they can muster this Saturday.

*For this occasionally irrational fealty to college athletics, it seems, Jeff Pearlman would declare me a loser. To which I say: Doesn't this argument in fact negate your well-documented hatred of Chuck Fusina? After all, if college sports should largely be reserved for the students who play them and the students who watch...and if your larger point is that we've lost our perspective on the games themselves...then shouldn't we in fact appreciate athletes like Chuck Fusina--athletes whose careers just so happen to peak in their late teens, or early twenties, athletes who have legendary college careers but aren't meant to play professional sports--far more than we actually do?

On Bigger Than the Game: The First 759 Words

I've shown you the first draft of the introduction to Bigger Than the Game. So here, without further ado, is the final draft (with perhaps a few last-minute edits excluded) of the first five paragraphs. It goes on from there for a little while longer. And there are pictures (like the one below, courtesy of my old school newspaper, The Daily Collegian) in the middle!

And on a side note, the timing of this list seems fitting.

He came screaming into the picture from some faraway place, helmet in hand, a mongrel’s mane of spikes and curlicues and rattails glistening in the artificial lights of an aged football stadium. He may have been barking; on television, it was difficult to tell. And while it is true that he did not actually belong on this field at that particular moment, it is also true that he did not abide by traditional rules or social mores. His heroes had never been football players: He saw himself more as a modern-day version of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as an insurrectionist amid the asylum of organized sports. He drove a white Corvette, he wore an extremely large earring, and he had a standing appointment with a hairstylist. He had taken to calling himself The Boz.

New Year’s night, 1986: I was thirteen years old, watching the moment unfold on a nineteen-inch RCA television in a family room in State College, Pennsylvania. It was the second quarter of the Orange Bowl, and the winner between Penn State (my hometown team) and Oklahoma would take home the national championship; there was little understanding or concordance between the sides. And here was The Boz, the most dynamic linebacker in college football, looming and smirking on our screen, celebrating a University of Oklahoma touchdown pass (one that would ultimately win them the game) by smothering his quarterback in a bear hug, thereby guaranteeing himself a few extra seconds of screen time while his teammates boogied in the end zone. He was an inscrutable and terrifying figure dressed up in a crimson jersey, the manifestation of a flamboyant and calculating new-age dogma which I did not yet comprehend.

A few years earlier, Penn State’s coach, a Brown graduate named Joseph Vincent Paterno, had classified Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer, the son of an Arkansas bootlegger, as among the least honorable men in his profession. Paterno had since apologized and walked back from his remarks, but the contrast between their programs remained obvious: Oklahoma’s quarterback, a freshman named Jamelle Holieway, carried a Louis Vuitton purse (“my little clutch bag,” he called it) and wore a diamond stud and a gold watch and a gold chain, and had a tattoo on his arm that read JAMMIN’. John Shaffer, Penn State’s tin-can quarterback, possessed no such adornments; he was so slow and unremarkable that he had once managed to dislodge his shoulder from its socket while leaping up for a high-five. A few days before the game, The New York Times reported, The Boz—proper name: Brian Kenneth Bosworth—had passed by Shaffer underneath the Orange Bowl stands, wearing a pair of gold chains over his jersey, wearing sunglasses in a steady drizzle. And Shaffer eyed him from head to toe without moving his head, “not unlike the way hard hats once sized up hippies.”

All of this raised questions about whether a college football game could somehow mirror a social divide in the 1980s, about whether we were bearing witness, in the Orange Bowl, to a generational schism, about whether The Boz and his embrace of glamour and status on a football field was a sign of the impending breakdown of modern society, about whether Penn State and their prison-issue uniforms and their square quarterback and their seriousness were the last embodiment of a bygone era. “The Penn State players,” wrote John Ed Bradley in The Washington Post, “carry on as if on some dire, portentous mission of the soul.”

This book was born of the curious contrast displayed on my television screen that evening; the stories contained within are no doubt shaped by the visceral experiences of a teenaged boy coming of age in central Pennsylvania in 1986. But I would like to think that this is actually a story about how sports shaped and defined the cultural perceptions of a generation of American youth—of all those kids like me who grew up largely within the mythological confines of our own television screens, gawking at strange creatures like The Boz. It is a story that culminates precisely one year and one day later, on January 2, 1987, when Penn State again played for the national championship against a group of rogues and miscreants from the University of Miami. Each of these games was marketed and packaged as a morality play, and yet, as with most morality plays of the era, the personalities I grew up watching on that nineteen-inch RCA were not as nakedly uncomplicated as the imagery often made them out to be.

On Bigger Than the Game: The Deleted Scenes (Part 2)

Just in case you aren't jacked enough about the impending release of my new book, I've decided to include some excised (and abandoned) material here. The following is an early draft of the prologue to my book; the final version touches on many of the same points, but in a much different manner. I apologize for any incoherence, as this is kind of a patchwork version pieced together from many, many early drafts.

This book was born of an event that took place during the final days of 1986, the year I turned 14 years old, the year the space shuttle Challenger vaporized on our television screens, the year a young basketball star overdosed on cocaine twenty-four hours after he became a millionaire, the year a wildly popular president chose to defy the directives of Congress, the year several Wall Street brokers affirmed, both with their words and their deeds, that greed had become a virtue in America. It was a year marred by duplicity and scandal and self-involvement, a year when so many things seemed to be going well in America, and then so many things suddenly and inexplicably seemed to go wrong.
All of this had already occurred by the time two diametrically opposed football teams arrived in the Arizona desert for the annual Fiesta Bowl steak fry, an occasion marked in the past by pomp and ceremony and general malaise. But this year, something was different. This year, one team wore suits and and ties to the steak fry, and the other team wore black sweatsuits. This year, one team, Penn State, was coached by an Ivy League graduate who preached academic integrity and cited the Aeneid as his favorite book; this year, the other team, the University of Miami, was coached by an ambitious man with an elegant coiffure who had sarcastically dubbed his counterpart as “St. Joe.” The theme was country western, and the mood was High Noon tense, and then the dinner theater portion of the evening began, and that’s where things suddenly and inexplicably went wrong.
   

It began with a punter making jokes.  

---

The punter’s name was John Bruno, and in my hometown of State College, Pennsylvania, he is regarded as one of the last heroes of a bygone era. That night at the steak fry, as per the instructions of the Fiesta Bowl organizers, John Bruno performed a skit. In fact, Bruno took so much pride in his duties as the skit’s emcee that he wrote out extensive notes beforehand; when the moment arrived, the punter stood up and made like Don Rickles. He ridiculed the opposing coach, Jimmy Johnson, for his ridiculous coiffure, dragging out a garbage can labeled with masking tape as Jimmy Johnson’s Hair Spray. Then, facing a University of Miami team that had been basking in immodesty and self-regard all week long, a team that had endeavored to display its solidarity by dressing in camoflauge combat fatigues, Bruno said this: “We’re (also) close at Penn State. We even let the black guys eat with us at the training table once a week.”
  

Now it was Miami’s turn. All week long—hell, all year long--they had been portrayed as the villains, as rampant egotists, as insolent upstarts, while Paterno and his Penn State players, dressed in suits and ties, were portrayed as less talented yet unconceited, as the last great hope for the withering notion that success and arrogance need exist in tandem. And this was partially a media creation, for Penn State’s players were not immune to fights and bluster, and Miami’s players were not entirely immune to introspection; but in this moment, in an age of American myth, in the era of the movie cowboy-turned-president, the dichotomy had become entirely real. When Bruno stepped down, Miami’s 290-pound defensive tackle, Jerome Brown—agitated by what he perceived to be an obvious racist remark--took to the stage, unzipped his black sweatsuit to reveal the combat fatigues he and his teammates had been sporting all week.

“Did the Japanese sit down and eat with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them?” he said. “No. We're outta here.”
 

Out toward their buses went the men in the fatigues, cementing a reputation for bad behavior and rebelliousness that their school still cannot shake, more than fifteen years after Brown's death in a car accident. Then Bruno stood up again, made an extemperaneous crack about Miami having to leave so the players could begin filming “Rambo III,” and delivered a quote that Penn State football fans still evoke, more than fifteen years after their noble punter’s death from melanoma.

“Excuse me,” replied the punter. “But didn't the Japanese lose the war?”  

---

True, this was just a football game, but already, it was the most-hyped college football game in history (The Game of the Century, the organizers were calling it, embracing their inner Barnums), and the subtext had an epic feel to it, even if quite a bit of that was a hyperbolic set-up, for this game was being sold as a confrontation between Good and Evil. At this time, at this moment in American history, the power of mythology was as strong as it had ever been: Our president, after all, had once been a celluloid cowboy, and once referred to our Russian enemies as the “Evil Empire.” And so: The Suits versus the Sweatsuits. Why not? As a teenager living in central Pennsylvania, as an unabashed fan of the Suits, I bought into all of it.

Of course, I realize now that this steak fry, and the truly epic football game that followed a few days later, was not a battle of Good vs. Evil, for such a definition is far too simplistic. This was a confrontation between the Past and the Future. It was not about two teams, but about the perceptions of these two teams, and what they represented to sports fans. This confrontation was a symptom of the ongoing battles within the cultural Zeitgeist, about the virtues and vices of objectivism and welfare and racial identity and television and money, money, money. And it wasn’t just exploding like this in the desert: It was happening in Chicago, where a young quarterback was stubbornly determined to simultaneously defy the establishment and make a profit; it was happening in Washington, D.C., where a young basketball star seemed so caught up in stardom that he appeared to have lost sight of his own mortality; and it was happening in Alabama, where the greatest athlete to emerge in a generation embraced his own mythology on the way to becoming a cultural catchphrase. It was, in turn, about the dawn of a new age—a modern age--in American sports, and the repercussions and influences of that age have long since overwhelmed every aspect of the games we watch. For better or worse, we are living it.

On Penn State vs. Nebraska

It's still the greatest finish I've ever witnessed in person, even though I didn't actually see the ending, even though I was shielded by a mass of body parts, even though I've since covered Masters and World Series and Final Fours, even though I was there the day John Elway pirouetted above a gaggle of Green Bay Packers. And maybe it was just the timing--I was nine years old, a kid growing up in a college town, and everything seemed bigger then, Penn State football most of all--but this was the first thing I thought about when I heard Nebraska seemed likely to defect to the Big Ten: I thought of a catch that never was, and I thought of a tight end named Stonehands.

This was 1982, in that sliver of time (a five-year span) when Penn State and Nebraska met on a yearly basis. These were the days of Turner Gill and Mike Rozier and Jarvis Redwine, of Todd Blackledge and Curt Warner* and Kenny Jackson, of Tom Osborne vs. Joe Paterno, the two most mythic figures in their respective states, arguably the two best coaches in America who had never won a national championship. Nebraska fielded a wave of farm-raised, scarlet automatons back then. They took three of those games, and in truth, they probably should have taken all five--they won 42-17 over a schizophrenic Penn State team in 1979, and they ground out a 21-7 win in 1980, and they annihilated Penn State 44-6 in the '83 Kickoff Classic. (Penn State slipped out of Lincoln with a 30-24 win in 1981.)

But '82 was the greatest game of them all. '82 was, arguably, the moment that changed Penn State football forever. You have to remember: College football was different back then. It was just becoming a national entertainment. An NFL strike loomed that weekend, and the start time of the game was moved to 3:45 p.m. so CBS had some football to show that weekend, and because Beaver Stadium did not have its own permanent illumination, portable lights were trucked in from Iowa, lending everything a weird sheen.

Now, that Penn State team was quite good: Blackledge was an excellent college quarterback, and Warner was a superstar, and the defense was solid all around, and they would lose only one game (to Alabama), and go on to win Paterno's first national championship in the Sugar Bowl against Georgia. But that Nebraska team was epic. This was their backfield: Turner Gill at quarterback, Roger Craig at fullback, and Mike Rozier at I-back. If that's not the greatest triumvirate in the history of college football, it's awfully close.

So anyway, this was the matchup; Nebraska, playing on the road, was still a favorite. And Penn State took the lead, and then Nebraska came back, and then Nebraska took the lead when Gill leapt into the end zone with one minute, eighteen seconds remaining.**(For some reason, that number always sticks in my head: 1:18. It is my Valenzetti equation; it is my 4-8-15-16-23-42. When I am measuring a victorious comeback drive, I measure it against that number: Seventy-eight seconds.) It didn't possibly seem like enough time to drive 65 yards against Nebraska, but then things just started happening: Blackledge completed one pass, and another, and suddenly the ball was at the Nebraska 34. Penn State ran an inexplicable (yet entirely predictable) draw play, and then Blackledge threw two interceptions, and it was fourth down. And this is how comebacks so often go: You exhale, and then you lose your breath, and then you exhale again, accept the disappointment, and move on.

But one out of every ten times, something completely insane happens, a series of events that seems inspired by intelligent design, and these are the moments that set sports apart from any other human endeavor. This was one of those times. Blackledge scrambled, and he found Kenny Jackson for a first down. Blackledge scrambled for six yards to the Nebraska 17. There were 13 seconds remaining. Thirteen seconds, and Blackledge took the snap, and threw to the left sideline, to a tight end named Mike McCloskey. This is that play. You will notice, if you are observing closely, that McCloskey failed to get a second foot in bounds. You will notice, if you are especially watchful, that McCloskey failed to get a first foot in bounds, as well.***It was a travesty. It was a miracle. Penn State had a first-and-goal at the Nebraska 2-yard line and nine seconds remained and Penn State inserted its second tight end, a young man named Kirk Bowman. Nickname: Stonehands. Bowman would wind up catching two passes all season (one came earlier in the afternoon). But Blackledge dropped back and McCloskey was covered and so he threw a soft little lob into the middle of the end zone, and Stonehands flopped to the grass and cradled the pigskin like a baby bird, scooping it off the turf.

I did not see any of this, of course. I was nine years old and standing on my seat, but eighty-five thousand people were standing, as well, and I had no idea what was happening until my father turned to me and screamed. I have only heard my father scream like that once or twice in my lifetime, usually about my performance in 10th-grade chemistry or an errant golf ball. But on that evening, my father did, in fact, scream until his voice was hoarse. "He caught it!" And then: "He caught it!" And when I asked who had caught it: "He caught it!"

He caught it. His name was Stonehands, and if I am being honest with myself, he probably never should have been in that position, for a myriad of reasons. A game was stolen that night, and such a sequence of events might never occur again in my lifetime. But because it did, I adore the very idea of Nebraska joining the Big Ten, of these two teams facing each other year after year. Because someday, another miracle will take place, and someone like Stonehands will catch another one.

*Still the greatest NFL player named Curt Warner, at least in my heart.
**Years ago, in college, I wrote a column about this game. It's terrible, so terrible I won't link to it here, because everything everyone writes for their college newspaper is inevitably terrible, but I talked a good deal about my father, a highly trained pessimist, who at that point seemed determined to beat the traffic.
***Sixteen years later, McCloskey admitted he was out of bounds during a speech at a Boys Town in Nebraska. The speech made headlines in the local newspapers.

On The Mystery of Home-Field Advantage

Not long ago, I engaged in a heated discussion about the impact a voluminous marching band could have on a college sporting event. A good marching band, I said, was worth approximately 2 1/2 to 3 points on the scoreboard for the home team. Now, I was not being entirely serious (there may have been alcohol involved); I have no scientific basis for this assessment, and I am most likely overvaluing the importance of an overweight tuba player, but I was getting at what is, to me, the most baffling issue in sports: The home-field advantage. My alma mater is now touting a study that shows its stadium is the loudest in the country. And I know Penn State is doing this, in part, as an excuse to move the students to the end zone, so as to charge more money for seat licenses. But it raises a serious question--why, in this era of specialization and precision and sports science, can no one seem to overcome the challenge of playing on the road? I mean, it's just noise--the physical impact of a crowd is non-existent. Hand signals can substitute for audibles; maybe one or two snaps per game might be directly impacted, but that's hardly enough to account for a three-point spread. Yet it does.

So why is one of the most colossal quandaries in competitive history something we now just take for granted, without any real empirical explanation?

I'm thinking about this now not just because of Penn State. I'm thinking about this because I've been watching the NBA playoffs, where, it seems, no one can seem to win consistently outside of their hometown's recreational domicile. Even teams that are clearly better than their opposition seem to have a certain expectation that they will lose at least one of two games on the road, and yet no one seems to know why this happens. And it is impossible to measure. Is it the travel itself? Is it the unfamiliar surroundings? Is it the crowd? We don't know. We can't ever know. If there's even been a thorough study of the reasons for a home-field advantage in sports, I've never seen it. I'd like to see it, but I have a feeling it doesn't exist.

I mean, I realize that business travel is not a particularly pleasant experience, unless you are a character in an Ivan Reitman film; but these teams are not traveling coach.* You would think they would adjust their sleep patterns and their practice habits and find ways to negate the home team's competitive advantage in terms of off-court/field factors. And you would think that noise and hostility would not rattle a group of athletes who have endured immense pressure to succeed for their entire lives. And yet it does. And even as sports becomes more wedded with statistical exactitude, this is one element that no one seems able to control. Not even the tuba player.

*Speaking of which, do professional athletes accumulate their own frequent-flier miles? If so, Jamie Moyer must have trillions. I'm guessing the dude could probably use his miles to purchase a Marriott in Mexico City.

On JoePa and the Overpriced Spectacles

Matt Hinton at the excellent Dr. Saturday/Yahoo! college football blog was kind enough to link to my essay about Joe Paterno and his whale pants, in reference to the auction of Paterno's glasses for $9,000. At this point, I've given up even guessing on what's happening with Joe's physiology; I don't know if he's spending his summer in Lourdes, or if he's actually six hundred and thirty-six years old. At this point, he's turned the Abe Simpson jokes entirely around. If in five more years he starts to resemble a fifty-five year old Brad Pitt, then I'll ask some hard questions.

On Topical Questions

I've been traveling for a few days, and have an unholy amount of work to get done in next couple of days, but here are two questions that have arisen--well, arisen in my own mind--during my absence:

1. What percentage of major college sports are content with virtuous mediocrity? And is this choice more admirable than selling one's soul for championships?

I speak specifically of my alma mater, the Pennsylvania State University, which now stands at 0-12 in the Big Ten despite coming off a year in which it won the NIT championship, despite the fact that the roster includes a guard who is almost certainly the best player in the program's history. I've written previously about my alma mater's long and illustrious basketball tradition, and every time I think it might actually getting better, it seems to get precipitously worse: On Saturday, I went to watch Penn State play Michigan State at the mausoleum known as the Bryce Jordan Center, where Daughtry concerts and tractor pulls generate far more interest than anything basketball could provide. The place was half-full; I was told it was one of the best crowds of the season.* Anyway, this post at Black Shoe Diaries outlines a number of the major issues, and also hints at the larger philosophical issue, which is whether it is perhaps more noble--given that modern college basketball is essentially sanctioned mafia warfare--to lose with dignity rather than win ignominiously.

2. Does it make sense to slide into first base?

I don't care what you say about the Winter Olympics. I know they're an easy target for blowhards like Bernard Goldberg. But I enjoy the Winter Olympics for the same reason I enjoy college football more than I enjoy pro football: Because it essentially a two-week mosaic of athletes dealing with the biggest successes/failures of their lives on national television. And I don't really care what the pursuit is--the stakes are what make it compelling. (Then again, I also spent two years attempting to document the merits of competitive chess, so this should not exactly surprise you.) But I do think the most intriguing debate of these Olympics may be this one: A number of speedskaters, in order to make up a couple of tenths of a second in the case of a photo finish, are literally attempting to get a leg up at the finish line. It evokes the age-old argument of whether it makes sense to slide into first base, but more than that, it's one of those utterly ridiculous trends that defy neat empirical categorization, like barefoot kicking and black mamba tights. And if all this high-kicking in tight outfits will lead to an inadvertent wardrobe malfunction, well, at least it gives the skeptics something to do other than mocking male figure skaters in Cobra Kai outfits and feigning outrage over athletes who compete in sports we don't really understand.

*This could easily be remedied by moving the majority of home basketball games back to Rec Hall, which, for those who are unfamiliar, was like a scruffy replicant of Cameron Indoor Stadium, and regularly provided the home team with a 10-to-15 point home-court advantage based on overall volume and students' direct proximity to the floor (at Rec Hall, if you were so inclined, you could actually bear hug Chris Webber on an out-of-bounds play. I will never cease to romanticize the place). But to do this would be to essentially admit defeat.

On The U and The Greatest Game Ever Played

It is not difficult for me to recall the very pinnacle of my existence as a sports fan. That would be January 2, 1987. I was fourteen years old. I have this theory that, in the lives of themajority of American males, the love of sports peaks at approximately the age of fourteen; at this moment, you are old enough to understand the nuances of the game but too young to be unenthralled by media construction and the inevitable failings of human behavior. And so for me, it all came together that night: Penn State defeated Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, in a game no one thought they could win, in a game against perhaps the most talented team in college football history, in a game that had been hyped as a literal confrontation between good and evil. It was a wonderful (if largely false) mythology, and it fit perfectly with the age; I write about it extensively in my book*--in fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that this game inspired the entire book, though it comprises just one chapter--but I was intrigued to see the situation portrayed by someone who grew up from an opposing perspective, that someone being Billy Corben, who directed "The U," ESPN's 30 for 30 film about the University of Miami football team in the 1980's.

I should say this: I thought Corben's first film, "Cocaine Cowboys," was a wicked piece of entertainment. And I feel the same way about "The U"--as an entertainment, as a presentation of a singular and oft-exaggerated viewpoint, it works beautifully; it was so effective in drawing out the visceral hatred of my childhood, I actually had to pause it a few times and walk in circles around my living room to cool myself down. But it should be said: Corben's made a propaganda film. There are no opposing voices. There is no one to point out that when the Miami players accuse Penn State of making racist remarks, they are referring to Penn State's (now deceased) punter, John Bruno, who, in what I can only assume was an attempt to defuse the racial tension in the room, made a joke about Penn State allowing the black players to eat at the training table once a week; there is no one to point out that Bruno also mocked Jimmy Johnson's hair, which is such an obvious and open target for ridicule that the Miami players do it themselves in the documentary, or that Bruno delivered the greatest line uttered by a punter in the history of football, when he refuted Jerome Brown's statement about the Japanese not dining with Pearl Harbor before they bombed by saying, "Didn't the Japanese lose the war?" And there is no one to point out that Miami did not merely lose that game because Vinny Testaverde threw five interceptions, but because Penn State's defensive backs intimidated Miami's receivers by jarring them with hard hits, and because Penn State's defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, designed a brilliant game plan that Johnson could not solve. And it's not just the Penn State game--there are moments like this throughout the whole film, when Corben seems so determined to present a sympathetic and entertaining picture of this team he adores that he glosses over the truth.

I mean, I understand the intent: I feel like Corben, as a Miami fan, set out to make a film that would purposefully and defiantly goad me, the fourteen year old kid who grew up sheltered in Central Pennysylvania and was utterly perplexed by the Miami ethos. (If that's the case, he succeeded.) I feel like Corben, a few years younger than me, possessed the reverse negative of my own worldview at age 14; maybe when Penn State beat Miami, all Corben could see, like Jimmy Johnson, was that the better team had lost, that the racism and stodginess of middle America had prevailed, that the team he loved was misunderstood and discriminated against. Of course, there is also much I know now that I did not know when I was adolescent, about race and poverty and African-American culture; there is much I can sympathize with, even if I can't bring myself to swallow it completely. It was the eighties, after all; everything was exaggerated.

And yet there is one moment in "The U" that breaks through Corben's protective screen; it comes when Miami players are decrying their image, and the media's portrayal of them. And it comes from--of all people--Michael Irvin.

"There was no conspiracy against us," he says. "We were just baaaaad boys."

And for a moment, when I heard that, I felt fourteen again.

*Ahem...available for pre-order.

On College Football and the Bottom Line

At the risk of contradicting myself, allow me to state a simple truth: Everyone with a semblance of a cerebral cortex knows that the college football bowl system is an inept and inadequate example of American capitalism at work. Recently, some well-meaning and obviously delusional fellow from the BCS started a Twitter feed, and said feed was promptly bombarded with bon mots and screeds (well, as much as one can screed in 140 characters) about the very idiocy of the BCS system the Twitter feed had been created to defend--and this is Twitter, where idiocy is often a default position. Nobody who considers themself an actual "fan" of college football would somehow feel the game had been cheapened by the introduction of a four-team playoff, or a plus-one game at the end of the season. Nobody. The bowl system is a business, and this is the only argument in its defense, and I don't think that point has ever been made clearer to me than right now.

Here's the situation: My alma mater, Penn State, has completed an utterly lackluster and strangely hollow season with 10 wins and two losses. Said losses were to Ohio State and Iowa, both at home. Neither game was particularly close. Now, Ohio State has locked up a Rose Bowl bid, and now there seems to be a legitimate question as to whether Penn State or Iowa deserves what might be the final BCS bowl slot. That is, Penn State--which lost to Iowa, 21-10, at home--may be chosen over Iowa, for reasons that relate entirely to commerce. Now, at some level, I understand this--it's a tough time in America, even for overpaid bowl executives in garish sportjackets, and since it is their game, they have some right to consider the bottom line. But as much as that may be true, this allegiance to economics over fairness is the prototypical example of why the bowl system, no matter how we contort it or rearrange it, sans playoff, will never be able to rightfully determine a national champion. I mean, this is utterly obvious, even to a Penn State sympathizer like me: There is no possible way Penn State could make the case that it deserves to be chosen for the Orange Bowl over Iowa. But this is college football, and deserve has nothing to do with it.

On "The Men of 47"

For those of you who might care about such things, I've got a new piece in this month's Penn Stater magazine. It's a story about the 1946 and 1947 Penn State football teams, led by an African-American superstar named Wally Triplett, and to quote my editor (and sometimes friend) Ryan Jones, it "tells the story of the post-World War II football teams that helped establish Penn State nationally as both a top program and unheralded force in the nation’s slow march to racial justice." I hope it's the kind of tale that resonates beyond the Penn State community, but either way, it was an interesting piece to write and I was excited to get the chance to tell it. You can find a PDF version here.

On College Debates, T-shirts, and Football

There are a lot of things I miss about college, but this doesn't mean I actually want to go back to college. I don't think I could handle going back, because those four* years were probably the most vivid and intense of my existence. I seem to remember everything about college, even certain things I probably don't want to remember, and I presume this is because every situation seemed freighted with artificial importance. Everyone in college, at all times, is on a quest to either A.) Maximize their newfound freedom, B.) Change the world's fundamental economic system by protesting about condoms, and/or C.) Build up their resume. Every conversation really feels like it matters, even if it's about beer.

And this is why the editorial page of a college newspaper is the most wonderful display of burgeoning humanity on earth. Back in my time, a columnist for our school newspaper appropriated the most incendiary language Malcolm X ever used: He referred to white people as "devils." He wound up on CNN. Only in college could we find ourselves so utterly divided over the issue of changing the name of the Women's Studies program to Womyn's Studies, so as to neuter the modifier; at times, the argument over a deliberate misspelling actually led people to storm out of rooms in protest. And yet we had no idea that the rest of the world wasn't taking us seriously at all.

And so it is even now at my alma mater, this time over a T-shirt, a T-shirt that may or may not**be a tool of Christian propaganda and indoctrination, though it was apparently dreamed up by a Jewish studies minor and drew approximately six complaints. But now it has become a story, and now it has become, no doubt, the talk of the entire campus. Only in college could so many people work themselves into a frenzy over a debate that directly affects no one at all. And I guess that's what I miss the most. Well, that and the chicken sandwiches.

*and a half.
**OK, probably not.

On Chaos and College Football

I thought about many things as I watched my alma mater drown in a sea of its own ineptitude on national television Saturday night. But mostly, I was thinking about Slippery Rock. And you may already know where I'm going with this, but in case you don't: Every year, someone figures a way to concoct a victory chain, a series of results in a logical progression that somehow manages to prove some eighth-tier liberal arts school deserves the national championship over Florida. I grew up in the wilds of central Pennsylvania, and so that school was usually Slippery Rock, because who can help but root for a college that sounds like it could be the title of a They Might Be Giants album?

In fact, I figured someone would have put a web site together to calculate these possibilities, because this seems like one of the primary purposes for the invention of the Internet. Not surprisingly, I was right. Here is the victory chain from Slippery Rock to Oklahoma in 2008:

Slippery Rock beat Kutztown who beat St Anselm who beat Merrimack who beat Stonehill who beat Wagner who beat Marist who beat Davidson who beat Jacksonville FL who beat San Diego who beat UC-Davis who beat Portland St who beat Eastern Washington who beat Weber St who beat Cal Poly SLO who beat San Diego St who beat UNLV who beat Wyoming who beat Tennessee who beat Vanderbilt who beat Mississippi who beat Florida

I was thinking about these victory chains not merely because Penn State lost, and not merely because Penn State seems likely to lose again and I was probably grasping for some measure of justification for what now seems like an inevitably disappointing season. I was thinking about victory chains because their fallacious logic justifies everything that is great and wonderful about college football, because it is a reminder that no sport* is more unpredictable, or more consistently harrowing, from week to week. College football is based in chaos**; there are so many variables, so many outliers, so many results that don't seem to compute. Think about it: The greatest play in the history of college football involved a dozen laterals and a trombone player. Top five teams are constantly losing, despite the pollsters' attempts to impose a structure and a social hierarchy on the season. California wins by three touchdowns, then loses by five touchdowns. USC survives on the road against a Top 10 team, then loses to the Detroit Lions of the Pac Ten. Miami's appears to have spearheaded a revival, and then embarrasses itself on the road. Nothing makes sense. Teams find their way, then lose their way, and find their way again, and by then it is often too late, because there is so little margin for error.

I know I slag on baseball far too often in this space. But I'm reading Joe Posnanski's The Machine, about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. I couldn't have cared less about that team, but the book is truly excellent, and I highly recommend it, and yet it also got me thinking about why I loved baseball so much as a kid and yet it seems anachronistic to me today. Maybe it's because baseball is such a careful and meticulous construction; the central tenet of the game is imposing order amid the routine of daily life (the early chapters of The Machine essentially center around the Reds' conservative manager, Sparky Anderson, attempting to carve out a winning lineup while confessing his problems to a Holiday Inn manager and refusing to allow his players to grow mustaches). Baseball was the metaphor for American life before the 1960's came along, with good reason, and it's history and heritage remains fascinating to me. But that world is long gone.

Football, for all its militaristic pretense, is essentially a desperate attempt to impose order amid the utter chaos of life. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and lately, given the diffusion of talent, given the pressure on athletes and the intensity of the home-field advantage, it has become more difficult than ever for any college football team to emerge unscathed. It may be that no one emerges in December without at least one loss. The tyranny of the victory chain is absolute. Chaos reigns. And maybe, if college sports can still be at all regarded as a formative experience for its participants as they prepare to enter the modern world, that's the way it should be.

*Possible exception: The NCAA basketball tournament. But even March Madness has become a much more predictable event in the era of RPI's and number-crunching.
**Or as my friend used to pronounce it when he was a kid, when he had only come across the word in books: CHOW-se. As in, "It's CHOW-se out there on the playground!"