Penn State Football By the Numbers

This piece was originally published by the Huffington Post. Click here to read it in full.

When the indictment of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was made public in November 2011, Penn State did not cancel its season as it should have. Yes, once legendary and now summarily disgraced head coach Joe Paterno had been fired. And yes, a cabal of the university president and other administrators responsible for the cover-up of Sandusky's chronic sexual molestation of children had been dismantled. 

But a game against Nebraska beckoned, followed by two more regular season games and a bowl game with many dollar signs trailing close behind. Let's remember that this was a dream match-up, too -- elite programs united for the first time under the majestic banner of the Big Ten. So while a rapist of children had been abetted by the university directly and the football team specifically, the game -- the show, that is -- had to go on.

Yet, it would be impossible for Penn State to completely ignore revelations about Sandusky's abuses and the school's gross mishandling of this tragic situation -- including placing the institution's reputation above the welfare of the victims. So, in an ironic gesture, to say the least (brilliantly pilloried by Charles P. Pierce), before kick-off both teams gathered at midfield and took a knee to pray for the victims -- and the cameras.

Sports and religion can make for a nasty combination. One of the many disturbing things about the Penn State abuse scandal is that sports, like religious ritual, is supposed to offer an effective means to sublimate violence in order to deepen social meaning and communal connections. In this case, violence and power were allowed to grow wildly without proper ethical oversight.

 
Numbers 30:2-36:13 -- known as Matot-Masei in the traditional Jewish lectionary cycle -- demonstrates on a national level the challenges the ancient Israelites face in their attempts to balance the use of violence both ritually and in achieving the ultimate goal of subduing the land of Canaan.

The journey from Abraham's covenant to the threshold of the Promised Land has been rich and rough, and Matot-Masei marks the moments before this promise comes true. It includes final ordering of families and tribes as well as the challenges of waging war without losing control of its costs, its spoils and those members of the Israelite community either too reticent or too eager to fight. Coach Moses and his staff must channel disparate and often violent tribal energy toward an ultimate goal. Then, as the Torah portion ends, so too does the Book of Numbers itself. No more waiting in the tunnel to storm the field. It's game time.

Matot-Masei also contains detailed instructions about various rituals and practices that were intended to curb or limit violence, including the need for combatants to undergo a ritual cleansing after battle (31:19-24) and the establishment of cities of refuge to protect those who committed accidental manslaughter from vengeance (35:6-7). Of course, at the heart of Israelite spiritual life is the sacrificial system in which the priests receive the ultimate call for sublimating violence by killing animals (supplemented by various and sundry vegetative matter) to feed the ritual engine of Israelite religion.

In his recent book "On Sacrifice," Moshe Halbertal asserts René Girard's belief that religious sacrifice controls violence which would otherwise escalate endlessly amongst people. This is the job priests are born to cultivate and fulfill. They protect society by transforming its dark powers into light.
The challenge of balancing violence with a generative social use is what was called "The Great Experiment" at Penn State. This was Paterno's creed that while other schools might exploit the talents of athletes while ignoring their obligations to be students, football players in Happy Valley were expected to be both fierce competitors on the field and upright citizens on campus. As Michael Weinreb recently shared, we can now see how the Great Experiment failed. With children as silent victims, violence, abuse, terror, hypocrisy and fear overtook every corner of the laboratory.

And how does the experience of balancing violence with a form of societal benefit manifest itself in Matot-Masei? It's a mixed bag. 
 
Bloody war on both sides of the border of Canaan forces even the reluctant tribes of Gad and Reuben to fight (Numbers 32). The toll of violence resulting from entering the Land is almost too high to assess. But boundaries are carved, families counted and recounted, and laws of tribute and order established. Society begins to take shape for a people that must transform itself from a fierce and hungry fighting force to a sustainable culture with a powerful priestly cult feeding the desires of both God and the nation. This is a story of a people struggling with competing needs and notions of violence, power, ritual and culture that continue to stir in the Land of Israel through the rest of the biblical story and far beyond it.
 
Joe Paterno's Great Experiment was an American cult revered for harnessing football not only to produce good fortune for a school, a town, a state, the N.C.A.A. and Paterno himself, but also education, social cohesion and even a journey of the spirit for the players and fans that counted themselves among Penn State's tribe. Some of sports' most astute observers accepted that this cult was fair even when it began to become apparent that it was eating its own young.

Athletes and fans are animated by the bliss of sports in ways that few experiences can match. But now -- much like in the conclusion of Numbers -- as the bodies of the living and the dead and the living dead are being counted at Penn State, we can only pray that a community of positive use to itself and others will arise from the carnage.

Will Football Die?

Now that the football season that matters most is over -- an unsatisfying ending because of a flat rematch between LSU and Alabama, but also highlighted by many wonderful games in the bowl season -- it's time to return to a topic looming bigger and darker for football all the time: The unequivocal evidence mounting that the sport is leading to debilitating forms of brain damage for many of the people who play it.

It's easy to make a joke about the direct connection between football and bum brains. Ask anyone who doesn't get football how brainless it is. The irony here is that more than ever, thanks to the media, technology, Max Weber's Protestant Work Ethic, etc., etc., the game is more cerebral than ever (on this see Michael Weinreb concerning Alabama's Nick Saban as the prototypical scientist coach of his era) even as the sheer size and speed of today's players force it into a realm of contact the human body cannot really withstand.

Jonah Lehrer's piece on Grantland is not the first and will be far from the last to share this story. "If the sport of football ever dies," he writes, "it will die from the outside in. The only question now is whether the death has begun."

Read the full article here.

The Epic Tale of the Kardiac Kids

We have learned that Don Cockroft, one of the last of the straight-toe kickers in the NFL, has crafted the epic tale of the Kardiac Kids, the 1980 Cleveland Browns whose wild season of last-second victories led by Brian Sipe, Ozzie Newsome, the Pruitts and crew ended in heartbreak on the fluttering flight of a frozen pigskin intercepted by the Oakland Raiders at the open end of long-dead Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

How a team from thirty years ago that did not even make it past the first round of the playoffs can still mark a peak moment in the history of the city of Cleveland over the past half century suggests something dreadful about my old home town. But there it is: 672 pages at http://thekardiackids.com/.

On Joe Paterno and Leadership: Kill the Myth

I am a big football fan, not only because I enjoy watching and understanding the game, but because at some of the most formative moments of my life, I lived the game. I played on tremendous teams throughout high school. We were state runners-up my senior year, losing to hated Columbus Academy in the old Horseshoe at Ohio State Stadium in the final game of a team lead by veterans that had only lost one regular season contest during three years as starters – stolen by the evil refs, of course. I played that game with a dislocated elbow in a giant cushioned cast.

For quite a few years after graduation I enjoyed scanning the papers for the names of college players I had come up against myself in high school. This extended my youth even as I wandered into landscapes far more complicated then the clearly marked fields and obvious assignments of the fast-pulling guard I had been at seventeen.

One of my teammates, O.J. McDuffie, went on to play professionally for the Miami Dolphins for ten years. This extended my football youth even deeper into adulthood at a time when American sports were otherwise far from my mind. And yet, especially when visiting my hometown, I followed the career of O.J., the friend I had thrown my body around for all those many years before. (Indeed, it's a little known but essential crossroads of football history that before I was converted from quarterback to guard after my sophomore year, I had thrown O.J. his first pass as a Hawk in practice. He outran my best toss by about twenty yards.)

But before the pros, as announced at a press conference in the library of our high school after a year of visits on our campus by the head coaches of Notre Dame and Ohio State and Michigan and on and on and on, O.J. became a Penn State Nittany Lion, where he was both an All-American and generous to us has-beens with complimentary tickets to games and war stories.

At the time of his decision, some of us were a little disappointed. Though our team was a tight knit bunch used to long bus rides together across the state to small towns hoping to eat us alive and even longer days of sacrifice and practice in heat, rain, and snow, O.J. did not share his decision until the public announcement.

Some were surprised by his choice. It felt like a rather staid move for the exciting next stage in the arc of what we knew would be a stellar career. Penn State wore then as now those boring blue and white unis and its offense lacked flair. It prided itself on a typically Midwestern working-class defense that ground down opponents over the exertion of a hard knocks game. Still, other factors led O.J. to Happy Valley. For one thing, he knew that his mother would be able to drive to most of his games. A previous star from our school had also played there. But above all else, I suspect, like so many other winners, O.J. wanted to play for the great Coach Joe Paterno.

Anyone involved with college football inside or out knows the Paterno myth: rising up from immigrant Brooklyn to an interest in both football and literature at Brown; arriving at Penn State in the Truman years and head coaching there from 1966 until today. He becomes the winningest coach in Division I college football history and invests large amounts of time and money in the intellectual life of the campus, too. He models leadership of moral character and well-rounded achievement for "his boys," exemplars that the phrase "student-athlete" actually means something balanced and real in a realm where most universities criminally drain the talent of large numbers of players left to sputter and fail in other areas of college life and the life beyond it.

Today Joe Paterno has announced that he will retire at the end of the season after forty-five years as head football coach. In the words of CNN, "the resignation comes after a child sex abuse scandal in which one of Paterno’s former top assistants, Jerry Sandusky, has been charged with seven counts of 'involuntary deviant sexual intercourse.' Sandusky is accused of forcibly sodomizing young boys. One of those cases allegedly occurred in the shower of the Penn State locker room. A graduate assistant reported that incident to Paterno, who alerted the school's athletic director but did not talk to criminal authorities. Paterno has not been charged in the case, but he faced widespread calls to resign for not fulfilling his moral responsibility."

With all of the abhorrence I feel for the cover-up and hypocrisy it entails, all of the despair and sympathy I feel for those children and their families, and all of the love and commitment I have for what I know sports and education and camaraderie can do for young people when done right, my leadership learning is prosaic and simple.

As leaders, we must kill any myth of stature or remnant of ego or desire for personal accomplishment when any wisp or shadow of abuse of these gifts enters the spaces we manage. We serve, but when we are good at our service thanks to powerful vision and practice, the institutions and people inhabiting them can somehow come to serve us. In many small ways, such imbalance harms our work and pollutes our mandate. In a case such as this one, the result of selfish leadership is a contagion that spreads to cripple and kill not only the institution which seemingly only deigns to serve its leaders rather than its charges, but also, so tragically, steals the souls of the people it is meant to serve.