(03-05-2017 04:16 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  This thread was supposed to about the potential for an Eastern all sports league that was never realized not yet another diatribe about how message posters think the Sandusky scandal should have been handled.

Wait a second. The thread was about why Paterno's proposed Eastern all sports conference never came to fruition and I explained that it was about trust issues between Penn State and everyone else who had options: Pittsburgh, Maryland, Boston College and Syracuse.

I then demonstrated in great detail why those trust issues existed to provide context to the discussion.

The next question then becomes if it's just about one person, why didn't they just move past that one person to do what was best for the whole? I'm sorry but that then demands an explanation for just how powerful that one person was. You are literally talking about the single most powerful figure in the history of intercollegiate athletics and to just blow that off is to ignore the meat of the entire discussion.

As I've said multiple times during this thread, I don't think one person was responsible for that league failing to materialize. I think a lot of people screwed up along the way. However, if you're going to ask me which one figure was most responsible for it failing to materialize, I would point to the most powerful person involved in those discussions. He had a lot more power than everyone else involved and knew it but ultimately overplayed his hand.

That would all be just fine and dandy – after all, it really did work out pretty well for everyone in the end. It did not work out as well as it could have/should have but it certainly could've ended much worse for everyone – and would have had he gotten his way.

However, to then turn around and try to place the blame on everyone else for literally the rest of his life was beyond the pale. Basically, his position was that he wanted to create an all sports conference but the rest of the schools were too stupid to see his vision of the future. What he really meant was that they were too independent-minded to capitulate to his self-serving demands. To characterize it any other way is not merely disingenuous, it is flat out dishonest.