Interesting Sports Illustrated Excerpt from 1999

While trying to box up some of my stuff in my room, I came across several Sports Illustrated magazines from the 1990s. One that stuck out was the 1999 college football preview with Penn St. linebacker LaVar Arrington on the cover and a headline declaring Penn St. as the pre-season number one team in the country. With the recent scandal at Penn St., I decided to open it up and read the article. Here's the first two paragraphs:

     "Penn State is a place where football players are expected to be gentlemen. It is a place where nominations to the Playboy All-America team are unwelcome and where the drab uniforms are designed as armor against ego inflation. It's also a place where emotions on the field are kept in control, lest they interfere with the blessed execution of fundamentals, and where the prescribed pecking order demands that seniors rule and underclassmen wait. If Penn State football lived and breathed, it would floss daily and come to a full stop before turning right on red.

     Such staunch conservatism can take root when the man who sets the tone is a campus fixture for 50 years (think about that), including 33 as the coach. Joe Paterno gives the public a program it can feel good about, unlike renegade schools with extroverted thugs and low graduation rates. For this he is deified as an island of dignity, and he deserves it. Paterno has not only won 307 games (fourth most in major college football history to Eddie Robinson's 405) but also had a four-year graduation rate of 74% of his players (according to the latest NCAA figures) and given more than $4 million to Penn State, toward the construction of a library and for the endowment of faculty positions and scholarships."

Wow...there's so much there that has been contradicted in a matter of months. I could sit here and write a 5,000 word report about it, but I'm going to leave it as is. Let it sink in. I have re-read it four or five times now, and each time something else sticks out. Keep in mind, this was published only a year after Penn State (according to the Freeh Report) found out about Sandusky's sexual abuse. It's sad how far one can fall...