Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports lays out the essential TRUTH about former Penn State president Graham Spanier….in our opinion of course…far better than we could in his latest…
Graham Spanier, disgraced ex-Penn State president, epitomized NCAA hypocrisy, Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports
“Spanier was the ultimate NCAA busybody. He sat on and later chaired the organization’s Board of Directors, a position arguably more powerful than NCAA president. He was on the high-level NCAA management council. He chaired the BCS Oversight Committee.
He was everywhere over the last decade and a half, the epitome of the faceless bureaucrat that churns out all those lopsided NCAA rules and bizarre statutes in an effort to exert an iron grip on the system.
The NCAA is often vilified. It isn’t the workers at the Indianapolis headquarters who deserve scorn. It’s the Spanier types, the presidents and commissioners who write the rules one committee meeting at a time (usually from a Florida beachfront hotel).
He was a model of self-interest, distorted ethics and misplaced authority, much of it derived from the false concept that Penn State football operated on a higher ethical level than the rest of the country.
“He’d always lean on the Penn State thing,” said one administrator who served alongside Spanier on NCAA committees. “He always made the Penn State part known. Like, ‘Well, we do it within the rules and still win at Penn State, at Penn State football. Why can’t you? Why lower the bar? What’s wrong with you?’ “
It was a lie and Graham Spanier knew it. Not just in the case of Sandusky. There’s plenty more in the Freeh report. Incidents of the athletic department not following its own policies, not reporting potential violations, allowing head coach Joe Paterno’s outsized influence on discipline and other issues. For years the school didn’t even adhere to the federal Clery Act, which requires reporting crimes committed on campus.”
Double Amen to that Dan Wetzel and a prayer for the victims of the EVIL MONSTER Jerry Sandusky while we are at it which makes the rest of Wetzel’s takedown of Graham Spanier MUST reading for anyone that gives a Damn about intercollegiate athletics because whether anyone wants to admit it or not there are MORE “Graham Spaniers” out there running America’s colleges and universities and they are allowing all kinds of BS to go on in the name of “protecting the school” or their own precious asses.
Read the below Coaches Hot Seat Blog post from late November 2011 to understand fully just how bad it is right now in intercollegiate athletics in the highest corridors of power and how in some ways things are getting worse:
The Wall Street Journal Story This Week on Discipline Problems at Penn State Reminded Us Of An ESPN Outside the Lines Story on Penn State From the Summer of 2008…Yes, the Summer of 2008….About Discipline Problems at Penn State – Yes, There Have Been Questions About Discipline Problems at Penn State for Years Now and in 2008 the Coaches Hot Seat Blog Recommended A Way To Clean-Up the Mess at Penn State and in Intercollegiate Athletics….We and Others Were Ignored….and Things Have Gotten Only Worse Over the Past 3 Years….And the Worst Is Yet To Come….The Worst Is Yet To Come…Which Makes Some of These Sorry People In Positions of Power Across Intercollegiate Athletics Some Very Sorry Bastards That Really Don’t Care About Anything….But Lining Their Own Damn Pockets and If They Have To Cover-Up Things To Line Their Pockets…They Will Do It, Coaches Hot Seat Blog, November 23, 2011
There is a Helluva lot we could say in this spot to add to what Dan Wetzel wrote about Graham Spanier, but we are content with our opinion that Spanier is…
One of the Sorriest Human Beings alive on Planet Earth today
AND
As Dan Wetzel points out one of the Biggest Hypocrites as well
Yes, most certainly we could elaborate more on our opinions of Spanier and others across America’s colleges and universities and other Bastards that are right now involved in high positions of power in intercollegiate athletics, but what we would say would not be appropriate for a blog that is mostly read by adults because if we really told you what we think of Graham Spanier and a few other Bastards we would have to use a lot of curse words that some of our Mormon friends in Utah would call us out on…as they should!
Going to the deeper point made by Wetzel about Spanier and how there are lots of hypocrites in positions of leadership in American academia and intercollegiate athletics we have had a lot of discussions here at Coaches Hot Seat over the years about what we have seen, what we have found out, what we have personally investigated, what we have witnessed and what we have assumed about many I-A athletic programs across America and as we have compared ALL of the above to something that some of us here at Coaches Hot Seat care deeply about, Stanford University and Stanford Athletics, we have talked about what exactly we would want to see happen if one or more of Stanford’s sports teams were found to be breaking NCAA rules OR were God-forbid involved in something like the Sandusky scandal.
The REAL point when considering such things is whether the university athletic department and the biggest sport on most college campuses, the football program, is bigger than the university as a whole and certainly when one is talking about Stanford University what is MOST important, either athletics or academics with “academics” meaning THE University as a whole, there is no doubt in our minds if one or the other has to go because of wrongdoing OR if athletics got so big that it was dominating the university then it would athletics that would go in a nanosecond decision.
When now Big 12 commish Bob Bowlsby left the Stanford AD position in early May he held a meeting with the Stanford coaches and staff and said…
Bob Bowlsby leaving Stanford for Big 12, Tom FitzGerald, San Francisco Chronicle
“I just hope you realize what you have here,” a listener quoted Bowlsby as saying. “It’s the leader in how athletics and academics can work together.”
…and the main reason that Stanford University is a very special place is that Stanford’s athletic department including the football and basketball programs have never been, are not now and NEVER will be bigger than the university as a whole and we can say with full confidence if the day ever comes that a coach, an athlete or sports program at Stanford came to believe they were bigger than the school that is when their Sorry Ass(es) would be sent packing because NOTHING and NO ONE in the athletics department is more important that what goes on in the classrooms, lecture halls, research labs and all other important things that go on across the Stanford University campus…..PERIOD.
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