I saw this mentioned elswhere in O/T. I thought it deserved more discussion. Espescially for you Penn natives types, I'd like know what you think. Joe P is an undisputed football legend that I admire and respect greatly. Yet, with the competitive pressure, his age, and the current state of affairs at State College PA, well this is the burning question. Is it time foe Joe to hang up his cleats and call it a wonderful career? ?
Nope....it is not time for JoePa to go. He can't go out like this. He'll be back next year and have a good season. -Mike
Yeah, I live in State College, PA, and I go to PSU. Maybe if JoePa would lay off the hooch long enough to sit through game film, he might see where they are going wrong. Of course, everybody here loves him, and no PSU heads have a pair big enough to give him the boot. My prediction is he drinks himself to death before he retires/gets fired.
GO...bye bye and, btw, the whole graduation rate as his saving grace is over rated. PSU has a general graduation rate (the entire student body) of over 80%. That's of about 25,000 students. Basically, you can just show up and they'll just about throw a diploma at you. Of those, there are just around 350-400 registered NCAA student-athletes. Imagine how much easier it is for them to be given a pass. Non-scholarship athletes also are way more likely to stick it out than at the average school because it's relatively cheap to attend. If you have to repeat a course or whatever, taking the class twice is still cheaper than taking it once at Notre Dame. I think JoPa getting so much credit for upholding academics as a priority is a bunch of baloney. If he cared about academics, he'd send his players to a school that would actually challenge them and maybe give them a few Ds and Fs. That would NEVER happen at Paterno State.
I wish I could have a diploma thrown at me...by the time I graduate, it will have been 5-5.5 years of this crap. PSU may be cheaper than Notre Dame, and other private schools, but it's the most expensive public U in PA, and most expensive overall in the Big Ten. On average, tuition is spiked up a few hundred dollars a semester.
Hmmmm......what years were you at PSU Zulu? Like canopener, I WISH someone would have thrown a diploma at me. The stats you threw out there are typical of just about any school in the country with a strong athletic program. We are talking about the graduation rate of the 50-60 football players, not the 25,000 students. So, if you aren't going to give JoePa credit for the graduation rate of his football players, who gets it? The players sure deserve most of it, but it starts with the coach. JoePa has proven himself a positive influence in academics during his entire career at PSU. That is what sets him apart from many of the "football factories" around the country. When a kid chooses to attend PSU, JoePa is not going to encourage him to go to Notre Dame if they really want an education. They are at PSU, and JoePa will make sure they get the most of it. -Mike
I've heard of other recruiting programs of other big football schools in the region discouraging potential recruits from going to PSU because 'JoePa will be dead soon.'
Joe will probably retire at the end of this season. Of course I have nothing to coroborate this, but it seems like Penn St. needs a re-tooling.
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