There was time up there in the hinterlands of Happy Valley when a certain football coach could carry on his business in town with impunity. If there was a professor or another local pinheaded intellectual rolling through stops signs, then by golly, it was up to the football coach to restore order by making the necessary traffic stop.
Anarchy might be a concept that the intellectuals like to discuss and stroke their pointed beards over, but here in the real world anarchy doesn't get you to a Bowl Game, Poindexter!
After all, whose name is it on the library where they stash all those books the professors love to read and write? It ain't no philosopher... yeah, that's right; it's the football coach, smarty pants.
Better yet, it used to be that the football coach ran that little college town in the same way that Porky used to in that eponymously titled film. Ol' Porky even had the local law enforcement signed up for duty. In fact, when making the rounds about town the sheriff and his boys would occasionally come across a few of Porky's men who may or may not have had a little too much moonshine and were causing a "disturbance" or something like that.
But rather than take the miscreant to the lockup and run him through all that fingerprinting and photographing rigamarole, the local law would just take the deviant over to Porky's house to let him deal with it.
Hey, no sense getting worked up over boys just being boys.
Once upon a time the "Porky's Model" was how it was done up there in Happy Valley. Say a footballer had one too many after practice (or study hall) and decided to fire a crossbow into the dorms or, say, he may have teetered over the edge into felony rape and sexual-assault charges ... well, the State College PD and the campus cops could have just turned it over to Coach. No sense getting worked up over it.
Let the boss handle it. That's what he's here for.
But there's a big problem nowadays. It seems as if the times have changed up at State. It also seems as if those pinheads in academia and those degenerates in the media have finally started to take that whole "accountability" and "discipline" malarkey to heart. But this time it just doesn't apply to tailgating and rooting for Ol' State to win the big game and letting the boys be boys. Nope, instead they want to know things. Like, for instance, why the football coach won't tell the taxpayers in the Commonwealth how much his public-subsidized paycheck is for.
How gauche!
Then they want to know just who does the coach think he is when he "gently chided" a woman driver who may or may not have rolled through a stop sign. I mean come on, Coach... you know how those gals are behind the wheel. She was probably putting on her makeup and didn't see the sign. No wonder her husband was shouting, too. Cut him some slack, Coach - he has to live with her!
But oddly enough, those vultures want to know why the coach has not discussed the running back who will stand trial for felony rape and sexual-assault charges when the star player allegedly attempted to have sex with a woman sleeping in his apartment. "What makes this assault different ... is that she was punched in the kidney in order to gain compliance," assistant district attorney Lance Marshall said outside the courthouse. "This case is more unusual than our typical sex assault case" on campus.
Yes, and you want to know what else makes it different? In the first five games of this season, the running back rushed for 302 yards and six touchdowns.
It's a good thing that it's a star football player from Penn State that stands accused and not a lacrosse player from Duke. Otherwise, the school might cancel the rest of the season and suspend the program.
But something like that would never happen at Penn State, would it? Not with Mr. Clean/Joe Paterno running the show. After all, when asked about the charges levied on his running back, the football coach, understandably, got angry...
At the guy asking the question.
Here's an excerpt from last Wednesday's media teleconference:
Question: Bonnie Bernstein reported on ABC's telecast that you told her Austin Scott was off the team. He's no longer on the depth chart. What's his status?
Coach: You want to talk about anybody that we're playing? I'm not going to talk about it. Austin Scott's got to work some things out.
Yeah, like trying to stay out of jail, right?
Meanwhile, when asked if four of his players who were reportedly involved in an on-campus fight the night after the Iowa game would see action this weekend, The Coach said: "It depends how well they practice."
Come on... it was just a fight. It wasn't like they raped anyone.
Sheesh!
Now here's the thing that gets me: when I was a kid growing up in the so-called "Penn State Country,"[1] I read the football coach's biography. Actually, I didn't get the whole way through it, because after a while it was all about Penn State and football - two topics that generally bore me to tears. But I have to admit that I was enchanted by the coach's description of his grammar school and high school days in Brooklyn and how one specific Jesuit Brother used to make him stay late after to school for special assignments in Latin and literature. In fact, it may have been the most interesting section in any jock lit book I have ever read.
I wonder what that old Latin and literature student would think of the tired, old ball Coach who hasn't quite learned that things aren't the way they used to be.
[1] And rooting like hell against them. Rooting for Penn State, to me, is like rooting for Goliath. The same goes for Notre Dame, the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and Duke's basketball team. American ideals are better served when those teams lose.