Lights Out College Football

This past week left no uncertainty regarding the season of the year. I sweat buckets while inhaling bottled water with triple digit temperatures making my old frame wither every time I go to douse a plant outside to keep it from simply igniting in the afternoon sun. For all the scorching going on in the Southern San Joaquin Valley, this part of the world looks very mild when you compare it to the climate bearing down on Happy Valley, Pennsylvania where the campus of Penn State cooks under the hostile glare of a stunned world.


I cannot imagine anyone in America not knowing something about this story. A former top assistant coach and key recruiter for the Penn State football program, Jerry Sandusky, gets convicted on 45 of 48 counts brought against him for  various crimes of sexual abuse against children.  Mr. Sandusky created a nonprofit charitable organization The Second Mile in 1977 to help at-risk children, some of the children became victims of the founder's sexual abuse. Sandusky also adopted six children, and one of them has also alleged he was sexually abused, although those charges were not part of the trial which concluded in June 2012. The convictions were for crimes committed from 1994 to 2009. Terrible crimes, and chillingly reminiscent of the many crimes against children some Catholic Priests have been convicted of this past decade. 


And then we have Penn State University, and its total failure to do anything about these crimes 14 years after being alerted of serious sex abuse allegations being levied against one of their top assistant football coaches. The men at the top did nothing. Not the revered coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno. Not the Athletic Director of Penn State, Tim Curley. Not the Vice-President of Penn State, Gary Schultz. Not the President of Penn State, Graham Spanier. Not the Penn State Board of Trustees who oversee the University and all its policies and finances. As a matter of fact, after the first serious allegations at the university surfaced Jerry Sandusky was "allowed" to retire with full privileges and unlimited access to all campus facilities while getting a nice monetary parting gift of $168,000.  According to CNN, "Top university officials said they had never known Penn State "to provide this type of payment to a retiring employee." 


In its effort to get ahead of the crisis to blunt even more outrage, Penn State hired former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to investigate and report fully on the matter. The Freeh Report is 267 pages of condemnation of the University and the men who were entrusted to know and do better while running a state funded university. There are many who want to dig much deeper into this sordid saga of arrogance, abuse of power and greed, and think the current list of cut-out men ( a dead coach and three former executives of the university) is much too small. 


All I know is that justice works very slowly in this country, and many trials will be forthcoming in both the civil and criminal courts with lots of sordid details to digest for years. What penalty will Penn State, and more specifically its vaunted football program, pay for such big crimes against young people who needed protection not sexual abuse. What the headlines and most of the pundit talk around the country regarding this story fail to acknowledge, or do so quietly with the full understanding that nothing will ever really change, is that this story just encapsulates the nation's brutish football culture that campuses of high schools and colleges have created while pursuing the gold that media conglomerates dangle like rabbit decoys in front of administrative greyhounds running in circles around a track. 


A few weeks back I read a great Chuck Klosterman article on football and why Chuck finds it so fascinating today. Within this outstanding Grantland on-line column is a link to a debate on whether or not to ban football from college campuses. The debate comes courtesy of intelligence 2 (Squared) US on the New York University campus. The debate is lengthy, clocking in at nearly 2 hours. I've watched it three times, and have come away each time more convinced minor league football with big league revenues attached to it has no place on the campuses of our American universities.   


The arguments from the two panel advocates, Tim Green and Jason Whitlock,  who want to keep the game alive and well on college campuses focused on how the game builds character and team work. The two talked up the monetary gains for the colleges, and the benefits players  receive for their devotion to the game. The thrust of the two panelists, Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bissinger, for banning the game from colleges and universities dealt with head and body injury issues to the athletes and how the economics works against most players and the schools with football programs throughout America. 


Buzz Bissinger wrote the exceptional Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team And A 
Dream. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the New York Times best-seller, Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference. Gladwell is a New Yorker Magazine contributor columnist and has written 3 other best selling books. Tim Green is an NFL analyst on the Fox Network, and has authored 21 books of fiction and 3 non-fiction book titles. He is a lawyer who practices law in the state of New York. Jason Whitlock is a sportswriter for Foxsports.com and is a contributor to ESPN. The fascinating element to the debate procedure finds all those in attendance asked to give an indication on their leanings before the debate happens. Are they in favor of the proposal, against the proposal or are indifferent regarding the proposal? At the close of the debate the audience weighs in again with how they view things after hearing the debaters. This topic has been the biggest intelligence 2 (Squared) debate thus far.  


The results of the debate surprised me, as did some of the statistics the panelists offered into evidence as support of their positions. This debate took place after the allegations surfaced at Penn State surrounding Jerry Sandusky, but before his trial started. 


A Sports Illustrated column from March of 2011 written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Ketayian explored a twist on the Top 25 ranking of college football teams. These are the top poll  ranked football programs of 2010 and the number of players in their programs with criminal records  playing for those universities. Pittsburgh came away with the top ranking for utilizing the most players in their program (22 players) with a criminal background. Iowa and Arkansas tied for second with 18 apiece. Lo and behold, what team do you think tied with Boise State for third place in using players with criminal backgrounds? Penn State you say? Yes, indeed.


Let's not kid ourselves here in thinking just the top 25 teams utilize players with criminal backgrounds, or find their student athletes engaged in alleged criminal behavior. The people in Missoula, MT are living the Happy Valley, PA nightmare as the Justice Department investigates multiple rape allegations from 2010, and prior. The identity of this town of 86,000 in Western Montana has been all about their Grizzlies football team.  The university had more than 80 reported rapes over the past three years. Probably not the learning environment message you want to employ to recruit bright young people to your campus would be my guess. 


Here in the Southern San Joaquin in September of 2011 there were two dozen Fresno State Bulldog football players implicated in a welfare fraud case involving the Department of Social Services.  And the beat goes on.


It would be one thing if all colleges and universities with football programs made money to help underwrite tuition costs and other school fees, but 42% of all collegiate schools with football programs lost on average $2.9 million for 2010 according to a report by the NCAA. A USA report found students footed a $795 million bill for sports programs in 2009, which was up 18% from 2005. 


I find it absurd seeing football coaches salaries at the astronomic levels they are today. Knowing Jeff Tedford, the coach at Cal, is the highest paid UC system employee, and the highest paid state employee to boot, makes me want to take a serious life long sabbatical from college football.  Alabama pays Nick Saban  $5.62 million per year. Ask any Miami Dolphin fan about Nick Saban's character, and his willingness to tell the truth when up against it. Nick's daughter appears to be a chip off the old feisty and publicity seeking Saban block.  The list of overpaid football coaches is now legion in America, where the costs of getting a higher education get further and further out of reach, and student debt is now the great source of debt in this country surpassing credit card and mortgage debt this past year.  The total debt of student loans is now over a trillion dollars in this country. No shock to see a stagnating wage world in America  with soaring tuition coasts and the lowest state and local spending on higher education in 25 years create this debt disaster for families.


Over a million young guys strap-it up and play football in high schools throughout America. Of that total only  66,000 get to play college football, and of those only about a third get a scholarship. All this, and those players battling it out on the Saturdays putting the butts in the stands don't get a dime as the actual talent of the game. 


You'll never hear the analysts and play-byplay announcers call for ending their meal ticket. And the conglomerate media networks will never do the right thing and take a step back to see what despicable social reality they have created, since their only right thing has to do  with making their top executives, major investors and top talent oodles of money. 


So, in a day or two a verdict will come down on Penn State, and Penn State alone. But, Penn State was not created in a vacuum. Penn State is just the reflecting glass of our current university culture that allows abuses of power like Sandusky's to permeate our society, and gives passes to major indiscretions and infractions to those who fill a stadium and get a television contract.   


I will never follow college football again. I have been a football fan for most of my life, and have no issue with the game itself. If the business of football wants a minor league system of club teams not affiliated with universities by all means go for it. Have the USC, Ohio State, Nebraska, Alabama, Florida, Miami, Oklahoma, Boise State minor league teams play their hearts out any day of the week they choose. We just need to remove this caricature of a game from places where higher education should be the sole focus. No other nation on earth uses their hallowed halls of academics as the venue for head-banging entertainment.  





    

Thinking of Nashville & Record Store Days

Been awhile since I've been to Nashville and Memphis. Both Tennessee cities have taken it on the chin this week, and join the Gulf Coast area as this nation's early adopters to the climate change game. I heard an NPR report that the Nashville crisis is one of those five hundred year flood scenarios, but I think statistical declarations like that today are meaningless. As the clean up begins in both historic music cities people continue to learn how hard it is on the system in the midst of epochal change.

I think back on of all those trips to Nashville to visit both of the record-video stores we operated, and to visit with one of our major distributors, Ingram Entertainment. Our big store in the city was on West End Avenue, very close to Vanderbilt University. I still have fond memories of the opening events, and the big softball game we played with the road crew and new hires for the store. The manager and good friend, Michael Ludvik, had moved from the Bay Area to take on the new store with a regional managership to follow shortly. The smaller store was located on Opery Mill Road. They both shuttered when the Tower ship went down in 2006. The stores in Nashville, just like their eighty-plus counterparts in other cities, were just the victims of a commercial climate change in the industry where they resided.    

I bring all this up, because I got a new book from my lovely wife yesterday. The cover reads: From Vinyl To Digital and Back Again Record Store Days. The book was written by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo, and has a forward from Peter Buck of R.E.M. As a record store employee in the very early eighties I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Peter and the other members of  the band in very tight backstage quarters at the Keystone Palo Alto club in early 1982. This was their first major tour, which followed the release of their debut EP release, Chronic Town. It was a memorable night for me, and I still have the original EP in my collection.


Most of this morning I've been pouring the through the pages of this book, sorry about the allusion Tennessee, and thoroughly enjoying myself putting little bits of history back together again after the industrial storm of this decade went through most of the entertainment retail bricks and mortar. Old powerful store names like Wallich's Music City, Licorice Pizza, Peaches, Commodore, Sam Goody's, Wherehouse, Music Plus, Oar Folkjokeopus, Wuxtry Records, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores and so many more are featured throughout the pages with unique stories of passion, guile, humor and determination.

The cool thing about this book, which is a testament to the authors and probably a great editor, finds each chapter as part of the greater whole but also a self contained story on its own merit. You can pick the book  up at any point and put it down the same way. I call it the Chuck Klosterman method of book creation. Genius.

My beloved former boss, Russ Solomon, is liberally featured throughout with insightful anecdotes and messages. There are plenty of other great luminaries quoted in the pages helping create a detailed look at a century's worth of music retailing. The pages have lots of fabulous historical photos. A small statistic, which made me do a double-take, revealed that about a hundred years ago, okay 1906 to be precise, there were over 25,000 retail store fronts selling recorded music in the United States. By the mid 1950s the number had been paired to 7,500 locations,. Today there are less than 3,000 locations selling recorded music.The authors admire and honor many of the current merchants still retailing today, but especially to the folks at Amoeba for their discipline, catalog and success.

If you're in the mood for some fun history in a pop culture music vein this book is gold.

In case you thought I forgot where I started this post, here is a rhetorical question. Who would have thought the oldest existing record store in the country, George's Song Shop, would happen to be found in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?


Stay out of the hollers, friends.