The Sorry, Sorry State Of Major College Football

I will not be watching this evening’s national championship game between LSU and Alabama. I have no interest in either team and have spent little time watching college football in general. This is because with every passing year, the game becomes less an athletic spectacle and more the tip of an immense money-making iceberg.

The Rose Bowl was always my favorite post-season game because it followed the marvelous Tournament of Roses parade and pitted the best of the Big Ten against the best Pac 10 team. I did watch a few minutes of the Wisconsin-Oregon shootout on January 2, but it just wasn’t fun and less so because of what one sportswriter calls “the orgy of commercial branding that would shame a NASCAR event” and I didn’t stick around for the end.

Including tonight’s combatants, there will have been a total of 70 teams in bowl games, including an astonishing 14 who could barely manage 6-6 records. Absent a real playoff system, which would cut into the millions that bowl sponsors, host cities and the universities themselves make, the post-season has become . . . well, silly.

Then there is the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, which as the worst in college sports history was bad enough, but the aftermath has been nearly as awful as the university has revealed itself to be far more concerned about economic imperatives than the safety and welfare of young boys.

The trustees and new president have focused less on repairing the university’s tarnished image than reminding upset donors that they won’t get their money back, according to internal memos obtained by The Associated Press.

Then there is the anonymous $88 million donation, the largest in Penn State history, that it received amidst the scandal to build a competitive men’s ice hockey program.

The donor is Terry Pegula, the owner of the Buffalo Sabres, who in October hired the former finance chair of the Second Mile Charity run by Jerry Sandusky, who is charged with more than 40 counts of sexual misconduct involving boys he alleged culled through the charity and then raped, usually in the locker room showers of Penn State’s football team.

Is it a coincidence that Pegula’s wife is the biggest individual contributor to Tom Corbitt’s successful 2009 gubernatorial campaign, who along with her husband donated $280,000 to a man who was at the time state attorney general and took his good old time investigating Sandusky as opposed to getting him off the street?

Is it a coincidence that Corbitt now sits on Penn State’s board of trustees?

The university, of course, would be stupid to look an $88 million gift horse in the mouth, but the Pegula’s donation and ties to a governor who is a poster boy for conflicts of interest will do nothing to restore the school’s reputation.

The selection of a new Penn State football coach after nearly a half century was likely to be controversial. After all Joe Paterno, the winningest coach in major-college football had been a living legend. As well as an accessory in covering up the sex scandal, which got both he and the university president axed.

But the news that Bill O’Brien, the 42-year-old defensive coordinator for the New England Patriots, has been greeted with anger and derision by some former Nittany Lions players and a goodly number of fans.

O’Brien was hired at least in part because some more high-profile and established candidates were not interested in the job because of the toxic environment surrounding the football program. There also was displeasure that interim coach Tom Bradley, on the staff for 33 years and the defensive coordinator since 2000, was not given a chance to take over on a full-time basis.