On the surface, the Bobby Petrino saga is not a complex one: The man wiped out on his motorcycle while shuttling his 25-year-old mistress, a woman he’d recently hired and had allegedly gifted with $20 grand in cash. And then he lied about pretty much everything. It is a scenario far too preposterous for the pages of a Dan Jenkins novel, and it is in keeping with the public narrative of a man who has seemingly never been above resorting to the bald-faced lie. He did it in Atlanta, when he told the Falcons he was staying and then bolted for the Arkansas job while the mimeograph was still cooling; he did it when he interviewed for the Auburn job before one of his ex-bosses, Tommy Tuberville, had even been fired.
The following is excerpted fromDeath Comes to Happy Valley: Penn State and the Tragic Legacy of Joe Paternoby Jonathan Mahler. Copyright (c) 2012 by Jonathan Mahler. Excerpted by permission of Byliner Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
As the 1990s wore on, and [Joe Paterno] crossed over into his seventies, the stories about him grew increasingly elegiac. As hard as it was for anyone to imagine, the Paterno era seemed as though it must be drawing to a close.
There were puddles on the ground in New Orleans on Tuesday morning and the clouds were hanging low. It must have rained at some point late in the night, sometime after Alabama’s 21-0 win over LSU in the BCS Championship game. I had spent the night battling toward sleep against a constant loop of “Sweet Home Alabama,” and the awful cadence of rammer-jammer-yella-hammer. It was still ringing in my head in the morning as I clutched my coffee mug and stared at the still water on my neighbor’s roof. It can be a disheartening thing when the world outside so closely mirrors the world inside. You may call it the pathetic fallacy, but we Southerners are romantics; it’s in our nature to mold the humidity in our own images.
It was ferocious, it was kind of ugly, it was … kinda, sorta, what we expected? Well, we expected a hard-fought game dominated by the defenses, but I'm not sure anyone expected LSU's offense, which had helped the team score 53, 41, and 42 in its last three games (each against SEC opponents), to simply liquefy under the heat of Nick Saban's defense. If there was a decisive factor in the game, it's arguable that it was the ineptness of LSU's offense more than anything else.
“I will say this: I bet you there'll be a lot of people wish they'd given us a shot to see a different kind of game. We'd have thrown it 50 times. You like to think Brandon Weeden and Justin Blackmon could have put together some touchdowns. Get the ball thrown down the field and open some things up. Try to make it exciting, and see what happens.” — Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy
It got so bad that when the Crimson Tide dumped the Gatorade on Alabama coach Nick Saban, I half expected the Gatorade to be tackled for a loss. It got so bad that the 50-yard line died of sadness after the third quarter, and nobody noticed. It got so bad that the bespectacled marine biologist Allstate trotted out to try a 40-yard field goal at halftime had a legitimate shot to outscore the entire LSU offense. In the end, his zero-field goal performance only tied the entire LSU offense. He will be ranked no. 4 in the preseason coaches’ poll.
It got so bad that I spent about 15 minutes trying to plot what would happen if the bespectacled marine biologist were a team in the SEC West. Assume he’d lose in, say, six overtimes at Baton Rouge. That would make him the favorite against Auburn and the Mississippis, right? Even playing every position on both sides of the ball simultaneously and not being in shape or having a helmet or pads, he couldn’t produce a worse game plan than Les Miles and Greg Studrawa did Monday night in Alabama's 21-0 win over LSU. Honestly, I think he’d have a shot at the conference title game if he could squeak out the win over Arkansas.
So yeah, it got bad. Somewhere, on one of those winding forest roads that are always showing up in Michelin commercials, a deer frozen in the headlights of an onrushing Subaru Outback devoted the final second of its short life on earth to the thought: You know what, I’m still running the speed option better than Jordan Jefferson is right now.
And so, as an Oklahoma State fan, I say to you: What in the hell, people? I bring you many earnest what in the hells. That was it? That was the immovable wall of Technicolor fearsome that Oklahoma State and Stanford had no chance of competing against? That was your big reveal? We are now in the position of crowning a national champion that couldn’t convert the extra point after its solitary touchdown of the game. You’re seriously telling me that our poor little old Big 12/Pac-12 selves didn’t deserve a glance at this business?
Did you watch West Virginia and Clemson in the Orange Bowl on Wednesday night? Then we also recommend taking a look at Chris Brown's breakdown of West Virginia's offense, which ran on Grantland earlier this year. It's much more interesting than that game was!
At the end of the Best-Worst Sugar Bowl since Fordham's 2-0 drubbing of Missouri in 1942, those of us who made it that far witnessed one last inexplicable act: Michigan trotted out a kicker who resembled Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty, and said kicker stutter-stepped like a bad dancer before the ball was snapped. It was, technically, a false start, but who the hell knew what was real and what was illusory by then? No penalty was called, the kick split the uprights, the Wolverines completed one of the emptiest 11-win seasons in college football history, and the Big Ten somehow found reason to crow about a 4-6 bowl record whose successes were drawn largely from the utter ineptitude of their opponents.
Despite being outgained by Stanford by almost 180 yards in total offense, and outrushed 243 yards to 13, Oklahoma State won the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl on Monday by doing what it has done all year: Winning the turnover battle and getting big plays when the Cowboys needed them.
Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, playing in his final college game and aided by a bruising power run game, was 27-of-31 for 347 yards, two touchdowns, and a pick, not to mention several Herculean bail-out-my-team third-and-very-long conversions. But the best player on the field was Oklahoma State’s Justin Blackmon, who almost single-handedly revived a Cowboys offense that looked sluggish early. This season, Blackmon — who after the game announced he’d enter the NFL draft — had become something more of a possession type receiver in the up-tempo air raid/Mike Leach-influenced offense that Dana Holgorsen installed last season and Oklahoma State offensive coordinator Todd Monken led this year, as his yards per catch dropped by more than three with increased defensive attention. On Monday night, though, Blackmon was all big, clutch plays, catching eight important passes for 186 yards and three touchdowns, a ridiculous rate of 23.3 yards per catch. (This, despite battling what the broadcast reports referred to as an "inner-thigh infection.")
Yes, it must be noted that if Stanford's kicker doesn't miss one field goal in regulation and another in overtime, Oklahoma State probably doesn't come out with the victory. But it did, so let's look at a play that shows how Blackmon and the Cowboys rallied to win.
Whether you realize it or not, the gimmick’s dead. Oh sure, you’ll keep it up. You’ll run onto the field in your oblong stadium clad in some new, flashy fabric. You’ll keep building up facilities that make your athletic department look like a wooded Dubai. You’ll keep touting your corporate-funded, anti-tradition philosophy. But c’mon. It’s been 95 years since you’ve won the oldest, most patriarchal bowl of them all. It’s time to embrace your status. You might all be anarchists up in Eugene, but after knocking off a resilient Wisconsin team for the biggest victory in your school's history, you are now among the elite and powerful.
Why do the bowls persist? Crony capitalism rules once again.
This bowl season, 70 teams will compete in 35 bowls and more than $180 million will be paid to the conferences and schools represented. Ten will play in BCS bowls, which pay the lion’s share of the money.
Everyone from President Barack Obama to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler prefers a playoff format (like every other NCAA sport has) to the bowls, which seems both more fair and more fun. Yet the bowl system is in place contractually until 2014 and it has proven to be resilient.
Why has such an unpopular system had so much staying power? Before we get caught up in the excitement of bowl season, let’s figure out how the dollars and cents hold the system together.
With bowl season upon us, Michael Weinreb and Jon Dolan reflected on the past year in college football, discussed their favorite minor bowls this year, and looked ahead ... to 2026.
When you watch Army and Navy play, you know there's going to be option football — and tons of it.
Not the diluted "read offense" the Denver Broncos are now running that the commentariat insist on calling an "option offense,” or even the far more coherent (but still different) spread-and-read-to-run offenses of teams like Oregon. No, Army and Navy — along with Air Force and Georgia Tech — run the real deal. Specifically, those teams use the "flexbone" offense, which actually grew out of the pass-first run and shoot, but evolved into the premiere run-first offense in the country. Indeed, those four teams — the three service academies and Georgia Tech, which is led by former Navy coach Paul Johnson — were the top four rushing teams in college football.
It's the last week before bowl season, and though much has been decided, there's at least a modicum of drama left. Let's get all judgmental and count down the eight best games.
8. No. 9 Oregon vs. "UCLA," "Pac-12" "Championship"
Once in a while, as a kid, I would invite my neighbor up to play basketball. He wasn't very good, but there was no one else around. I'd regret it almost immediately; he'd feel bad for not playing well, I'd feel bad for beating him, and then I'd try to let him win a game to make it less horrible, but it ended up making it more horrible because he knew what I was doing. Still, we'd have to keep going to maintain the whole facade, to make sure no feelings were hurt. But why were we playing? What was the point? What I'm trying to say is, that neighbor's name was Rick Neuheisel (gasp!).
Your viewer’s guide for the final full weekend of the college football season, parsed into dual categories: The (relative) mainstream (The Cannon) and the indie (The JaMarcus).
Act I
The Cannon: No. 3 Arkansas (10-1) at no. 1 LSU (11-0), 2:30 p.m. EST, Friday, CBS
Rivalry Week is here, and there's a lot more at stake than just pride. Which is great because, really, who cares about pride? Most of us threw that out the window when we went on welfare just so we could afford HBO. It's the American story, folks. Don't blame the messenger. Anyway, there are more games with BCS implications this week than I can ever remember. The rundown is enough to make you store canned peaches and rifles in an underground shelter and pray for Thursday. So, here it be. (Note: I realize that not all of these games are true rivalries, so quit it with your semantics. There are bigger problems in this world, dude, such as your reflexive anger at trivialities.)
