(NOTE: the information in this article is incorrect. Please read the correction here.)
I guess we should have suspected that this would happen, but maybe this Turkey couldn’t add two plus two. Channel 21 News, somewhere in the heart of Pennsylvania, is reporting that an NCAA spokesperson confirmed to its news and sports director Jason Bristol that Penn State must return the trophies won during the period of vacated victories to whomever runs the bowls.
So, this will mean that the six bowls that PSU won during that period will have to be erased entirely from the records, or what? Will those years in which the Nittany Lions won two Outback Bowls, two Alamo Bowls, one Orange Bowl, and one Capital One Bowl show up with a blank line on the organizers’ web sites’ listings of winners, or an asterisk, or what? Will the NCAA perform some hasty accounting to make PSU give back its winners share of bowl proceeds for those wins, or is that covered in the $60 million they’re otherwise extracting?
Once again, the players whose glory derived from those bowl wins will be pawns, the memories of fine efforts in bowl games no longer represented by trophies in the lobby of the Lasch Football Building, trophies they could have shown their children and grandchildren on family visits to Penn State.
Man, I’m tired of this. It wears us all down. What a mess!
Enough is enough! At some point this has to awaken the sleeping Popeye being beaten unconscious by Bluto. Pass him the spinach! I am what I am and dat’s all what I am! We are what we are! WE ARE…
…PENN STATE !!!
[the refrain from “Fight on State” plays while spinach can opens and is guzzled by Popeye O’Brien]
Oops. I guess I was daydreaming there. We have to keep a laser focus on the future, says Obergruppenführer Peetz. No one is fighting. Bluto wins. Shame on me for thinking the outrage would finally impel someone to get up off the damn canvas.
One good thing, though: because we don’t get to play Moo U. for the foreseeable future and because the Spartans won last, they get to keep the ugly-ass Land Grant Trophy in East Lansing in perpetuity!
We have to be thankful for small miracles at this point when all the chips are down.
And big thanks to Joe, for pointing us to the original news story.