Emphasis supplied by James:
“The Freeh reports states quite explicitly and at least six times (a) that the 1998 incident did NOT involve any criminal conduct—on the part of Sandusky or anyone else—and (b) that Paterno had forced the resignation of Sandusky before the 1998 incident occurred … In any case, what EXACTLY is it that Paterno should have done? Fire him again? It is preposterous to argue, in my view, that PATERNO should have taken action after all of the people who were legally charged to take action had thoroughly examined the case and decided that no action was appropriate.”
I suppose if the question is, for some reason, limited to whether Paterno broke any laws in 1998, this exceedingly legalistic answer is marginally acceptable. But to sit here in 2012, knowing what we all now know about this, and about Paterno’s knowledge, subsequent inaction, subsequent lies and the tragic consequences of all of it which he, and maybe he alone, could have done the most to stop given his stature, and focus on whether at one brief moment in time Paterno was legally required to do more than he did seems preposterous.
It’s the sort of cherry-picking that, had someone done it to baseball data, would cause James to flip his lid. It is legalistic argument for argument’s sake that is so utterly beside the point when it comes to assessing Paterno in the present day that the word “misleading” doesn’t begin to do it justice.
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agreed, though I do think that he was right to do so given MLB's interests. Anyway, James is still off the deep end here.
I don't really get this. I just said James is blowing it in part because he is taking his Pete Rose/Dowd approach (I was the first person here to make the Dowd/Freeh comp here IIRC) with a topic that is a hell of lot more dangerous/important than Rose in an area about which he knows zip, and I simply said what I think Neyer was trying to say.
As to the shower thing, when our youngish assistant coaches (football and basketball) worked out/supervised our teams, I would sometimes see them in the big open shower with the players. But that wasn't a constant thing, there were always 25-30 guys or more, around, and we are talking about 15-18 year-olds, not little kids.
And, needless to say, it's a bad dodge, because it's so transparent. The only thing it can accomplish, in fact, is to provide an easy pull-quote/target for ridicule from the article -- "weirdo Bill James finds nothing unusual about men and boys showering together."
Just not the right answer.
everyone associated with the previous regime has been marginalized and folks will be pushed out the door in a metered process over the next year.
that means everyone save for basic admin/functionary roles
the university is being counselled that the hit will be severe iin terms of alums, corporate donations, state support, university branded merchandise, etc, etc
the lawyers are telling the financial folks to assume everything not nailed down may have to be dumped to pay for litigation
the crisis management and lawyer teams are telling the university to dump any visible connection to the old regime because it won't play well in front of a judge/judges since they call tell them so and so was fired and here are the new procedures but oh by the way we still have these visible ties to the bad old days but please ignore that jury/judge because that is there for other reasons.
draconian? overkill? quite likely. but the lawyers and others are telling them that if they don't carpetbomb the whole mess the thing will fester for years and they have umpteen corporate examples to use to justify these actions.
the only reason more changes have not happened already was the off chance the trial would play out differently. now that the guilty verdict is in if i had been hired by anyone associated with paterno i would have my resume circulating.
i can understand joe posnanski, hired to write a hagiography, brainwashed for months, saying stuff like - i can't believe it - wait, wait, it can't be true (he sounded like roger rabbit seeing pics of jessica rabbit playing pattycake with marvin acme).
i can understand rob neyer being reluctant to say anything negative about his oldest friend and mentor, trying to find a defense.
with bill james, seems to me that his whole life and career has been about sneering at people Who Think They Know, and pointing out as rudely as possible that They Don't Know and he himself is The Real Knower.
whole lot of people liked that attitude even though his thoughts and work were hardly original (father of sabermetrics my butt) and because his evaluations of many things turned out to be right, he was lionized for that AND FOR THE WAY HE SAID IT.
it's stuff like this should make a whole lot of james acolytes rethink their beliefs about james intellectual abilities
it is time like this i wish john was still alive to beautifully distinguish between legal and moral failures
best i can tell (new a genuwine laaar here) paterno was not indicted because at that time they were not able to catch him in a lie and because his failure to call police/CPS about any of the alleged rapes was not illegal and he did what was legally required which was to tell his immdiate "superior" and let him take it from there while joe just pretended nothing had happened.
he was never legally required to do anything more than what he did.
also he was still alive and i would bet a whole lot of $$$ that the GJ and prosecutors were still afraid of him
But Freeh apparently was able to do this. Didn't Paterno tell the GJ that he left it to Schultz and Curley to handle it? That doesn't square with the Curley saying that he was going to report until he met with Paterno. Seems to me that if Curley or Schultz had told that to the GJ, then Paterno should have been indicted for perjury too.
So again, why doesn't the prosecutor have to answer for this?
Posnanski's book even has an Amazon page with a book cover and a blurb. So I guess it really is coming out. Here's the blurb:
By America’s premier sportswriter, written with full cooperation of Joe Paterno and his family, Paterno is the definitive account of the epic life of America’s winningest college football coach. Published to coincide with Penn State football’s first season without their legendary leader.
Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Joe Paterno was a first generation college student who became a star quarterback while attending Brown University. After graduation in 1950, at age twenty-three, he was hired by his former coach as assistant coach at Penn State. Over the course of sixty-two football seasons, Joe Paterno’s influence was felt as the Nittany Lions won 409 games, a Division I record for a coach. He was honored with every distinction the sports industry has to offer, from being the coach to receive Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, to the Associated Press College Football Coach Award, to the NCAA’s Gerald R. Ford Award.
Joe Posnanski spent the last two years of Paterno’s life with him, getting to know the man and his family, and was there as the scandal broke that eventually consumed him. Written with unprecedented access, Paterno gets inside the mind of one of America’s most brilliant and charismatic coaches.
Indeed. That is more or less what Calcaterra said as well.
IIRC, Posnanski's advance was massive, and of course they are assuming that the scandal will jack up sales well beyond what they would have been anyway.
This thread is from 2010. I'm pretty sure that more than a few people around State College knew something, though they probably knew around the time the Sandusky investigation got rolling.
Before that? Who knows. I certainly am suspicious.
But nuking the program because a bunch of you don't like Big Time College Football isn't the way to go about this, any more you nuke the Presidency because you don't like what someone with a little bit of power. I didn't like the Iraq War, but if you want to prevent another such war you can't magically wave your hand and get rid of an entire institution. You remain vigilant, you act to try to take over the institutions that you believe have done wrong.
The delusional folks in State College aside, most of us have the sense to go after those actually culpable, a result which will include people going to jail and the University paying a significant penalty to the victims as compensation. In other words, pretty much in the manner manner as how everything else in the justice system works. I'm not really interested in a solution where random employees, random business owners, and random students (I love how some just casually assume that asking a football player to find another program is something that's just done, as if this kid is some pawn in your little game to make the world more like you'd want it to be) are punished out of some sort of blood lust. I'm interested in a solution where Graham Spanier, Curley, et al, are punished for what they've done.
And let's not pretend that nuking PSU would set some sort of precedent as a deterrent (as if child rape was a common problem in big time programs run by elderly, out of touch legendary coaches). If anything, giving the NCAA such authority will just make the cover up run even deeper. You're the president of the college, you've been there for a year, and something like this falls on your lap? Don't you cover it up, even though you don't approve and want no part of it, just because admitting it means destruction of a significant part of the institution that you govern.
And I think it's hilarious that those of you who are so critical of college sports as currently run think the answer lies in giving the *NCAA* more power.
Maybe they were afraid that Happy Valley would've turned into Jonestown redux (judging from the wailing & gnashing of teeth & rending of garments we saw after Paterno was finally forced out)?
The Philippines?
Who knows what they would have done if they had seen the smoking gun emails in the Freeh report, though. The email chain goes something like
1) We're definitely going to report this
2) Have we decided on our course of action? Coach is VERY interested
3) I talked with Coach, and the new plan is to do nothing.
4) I definitely agree that the new plan is wonderful and not at all insane, although I want to note for the record that if this behavior doesn't stop, we are completely screwed.
...
5) Coach wants to rehire Sandusky.
If you wanted to prosecute Paterno, it seems like you'd have to turn Curley or else find an outside witness. As the only person not conducting his business by email, he's the only one who successfully avoided a paper trail. Lessons for anyone planning their own criminal conspiracy, I guess.
it will be the psu leadership demonstrating that things are going in a 'new' direction
i feel for those not in the athletic dept because the psu they joined and knew is likely going to cease to exist
What made James who he is was an insight into the hidden aspects of the game that could be seen using numbers. I don't see why that gives him any special insight into matters that, as presented in the Freeh Report, are actually pretty open and shut. Indeed, he's actively ignoring facts, not seeking out the hidden facts, to support his position.
And if Neyer is his friend, he helps James by talking to him, not by throwing out a non sequitur about having read the Freeh Report. Given James' comments, it's pretty clear he's the one that's not read that report.
Nah. James has written a lot of great stuff about baseball and is a smart man. He is just blowing it very badly here. Intelligence isn't unilinear; different people are smart in different ways, and on top of that, people need to be careful when they are opining outside their knowledge bases. James actually joked about this in one of the Abstracts, in relation to Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. He forgot to apply it to himself.
I think it is reasonable to think less of Bill James the man due to this; I do. But it is not as if this means the Abstracts all actually sucked or James was always an intellectual fraud and a crappy writer. Bill James the baseball writer is still Bill James the baseball writer. You don't like him, and have been very loud and insistent about that for years, but this doesn't change his baseball work.
I read his book, he believes every single crackpot theory there are, including astrology and telepathy. Either he is the most gullible person in the world or he has dedicated his life to be an epic troll. Because it must be pretty funny to spew that nonsense while waving your Nobel in the face of science-worshiping skeptics.
Admittedly, he came up with the PCR while on PCP, or peyote, or something (the story I recall is that a glowing raccoon told him how to do it), so perhaps he just got lucky. Helluva way to get lucky, though.
I think you are conflating e-mails from 1998 with 2001.
In 1998, there was a full scale investigation going on. At the end of the investigation, Sandusky was not indicted. By that time, he was already separated, or being separated, from Penn State football. Joe Paterno may have known more about the investigation then he let on, and even with Sandusky not being indicted he should have more completely severed ties with him, but there was no criminal wrongdoing.
In 2001, Paterno reported the matter to his "superiors". That was all the law required him to do. He then apparently talked his "superiors" out of informing the police. This is based on two e-mails, but the e-mails are vague enough that all you can say for sure is that he talked to his superiors, not what he said. He may have been guilty of soliciting a crime, by convincing his superiors to break the law requiring them to report, but you would never get a conviction based on the plain text of the e-mails unless his "superiors" testified that this is what Joe did, and so far they have not. [EDIT: As to JoePa, the e-mails would be double or triple hearsay; there might be some exceptions to get them into evidence, but it would be a push].
During his Grand Jury testimony, JoePa apparently denied or downplayed his contacts with his superiors regarding the incident. It is not clear that the Grand Jury had those e-mails which might be proof of perjury. It is possible they did not, and by the time all this came out, JoePa was dead.
I think if you're the new college president, you pretty much have to sweep clean. You have the incalculable advantage of having nothing to do with the scandal, and you can't give that up for anything. In the long run, you actually prefer a scandal-filled report, because it strengthens your hand in getting rid of the old guys.
The Freeh report illustrates why Paterno had to go. Suppose you were hired to be the new president, and you inexplicably decide that Paterno can stay. Then six months into your tenure, the Freeh report comes back with smoking gun evidence that Paterno was implicated in the scandal. Now you've lost all credibility, and you don't even get to keep Paterno.
Possibly, although I thought that the "humane" discussion was all in 1998. Rehiring Sandusky in 1999 is just insane, though.
the college president isn't calling the shots here
from the moment they pushed aside the board leader to fire paterno psu as folks knew it became a corporate entity intent on survival
that person is also having a voice in how things play out
I am pretty sure that is 2001, because the "humane" thing was not reporting him to the cops. In 1998, the cops were already investigating.
the college president isn't calling the shots here
Well, if he has any shots to call, he should call them. There's no way you can take that job if Paterno stays.
it's bad politics to be anti-something until it is isn't
first one to brand himself as a "reformer" gets the pot of gold
not trying to be a foreteller of doom
hope i am wrong
I really have never heard of any legislator try to make a name for himself by trying to take on Penn State University, before or after the crisis. Unlike in your home state, PSU is based in the middle of rural nowhere where absolutely nothing else happens and nobody wants to live if they don't work at PSU, so it can't be attacked as a bastion of liberal elitism. And just about every county has a branch campus or two, which are all pretty boring entities. You'd think the Pitt/Penn State rivalry would lead to some zero-sum power struggles, like the ridiculous scenario of Kentucky and Louisville basically having warring blocs of hardcore fans in the state government, but that doesn't seem to be the case. We have Pitt, PSU, Temple, the various "_________ University of Pennsylvania" schools with good wrestling teams, it's a multipolar situation.
Also it's long been the case that Penn State and Pitt have gotten less than 10% of their operating budget from the state, and have had much higher tuition than most so-called public schools, so they aren't dependent on continuing good will from state legislators for their very existence. See the "Commonwealth System of Higher Education". I don't quite know what it means to be "state-related" rather than "state-controlled" but it seems important.
At the moment, even with the new state government elected in 2010 trying its utmost to cut budgets of every level of public education, PSU managed to maintain its previous year's amount of state funding this year and is having its smallest tuition increases in years.
okey doke
Only if you do it in an irish accent.
The humane email is from 2001. See page 75 of the Freeh Report. There wasn't any discussion about "rehiring" him in 1999, he hadn't retired yet. That discussion was over the terms of his retirement. He was demanding extra money to retire and they were discussing whether it just made more sense to let him keep coaching. See pp. 55-59.
Everyone who says that means that other people see what they want to see, while they themselves are perfectly free from bias and see the true nature of everything.
Rob's next tweet after that was asking someone "Have you read the Freeh Report?" So I guess now he can do that to people.
You mean Harrisburg.
Yeah, perjury is what I was talking about. I'm not seeing how he could have been indicted for anything else even if the GJ had had everything in the Freeh report. But the same GJ that decided Paterno was telling the truth indicted Curley and Schultz. I suppose if they'd asked Curley some more pointed questions, he'd have just perjured himself a few more times.
Judging from an ESPN Magazine story (one of the exceedingly rare worthwhile ones in that publication) I read just a couple of months ago, that appears to be the case.
To be precise, there are 19 branch campuses across the 67 counties. I went to two of them, Abington and Behrend (Erie) as well as the main campus. Yeah, I changed majors a lot, too.
There is a graduate center in Chester County (western Philly suburbs). I don't know if there is one out by Pittsburgh or not.
"Bill James COULD make a bigger fool of himself" might be a close second.
"Rob Neyer COULD kiss Bill James' ass more shamefully" is in the running as well.
but the guy from us steel didn't need guiding
i don't like james' style of writing, you're right. he's a vicious little shtt. to be nice about it. he was correct about many things about baseball players and many stats. but he's like the attack Dog who starts out attacking and he brings down 3 murderers. Yay. hero. But trouble is it's an attack Dog and you can be happy he brought down Bad People but trouble is he attacks little old ladies and the response should not be - but look at the murderers he got!!!
something is seriously fundamentally wrong with the way he thinks. he's not a genius because geniuses do not refuse to ever re-evaluate what/how they think. stubbornness can be a virtue but it can go to far and with james, he's gone WAAAAAYYY over the edge. it's like he's insisting that sac bunts are wonderful because it's what pitchers do best.
This doesn't really sound like James (at least on baseball). He was quite willing to re-evaluate his opinions.
James has re-evaluated his stance on a lot of baseball issues (like the sac bunt). You just have a personal thing about James. He certainly deserves to get reamed for the Paterno thing, and he is, and will be. But it doesn't have much to do with his baseball work. If you want to criticize that, fair enough. But it's mostly a separate issue.
As has been pointed out, it didn't occur to anyone else, either.
it offers an insight into the "Penn State Way"--not a very flattering one, either
As has been pointed out, it didn't occur to anyone else, either.
It did to the Bill James Online member who posted the original question a few days ago.
i haven't criticized his baseball concepts (with the exception of his spitting on jeff bagwell) . i have criticized the WAY he talks. he makes me want to put on large brass knuckles and punch him very VERY hard in the nose and i don't like feeling that way and i don't like people who make me feel that way.
i have most positively criticized james' work on topics which are not particularly baseball related - such as his defense of pete rose/criticism of the dowd report AND his absolute refusal to re-think or re-evaluate any sort of rebuttal. i haven't read his book on true crime so i can't say much about that. but i certainly can look at his mind and how he's thinkin about the paterno/sandusky thing and think that he's the kind of person who is always looking for something to criticize/put down and i realize that he's like the minor leaguer who can't adjust to ML pitchers adjusting to him
p.s. happy birthday - i know it's right around now
I think James' "Pass." on Bagwell just meant "This guy is a current superstar. I can't think of anything to say that you wouldn't already know, and/or let's wait a while so we can better put his career in perspective."
(He did, however, devote an entire article to the proposition that the 1985 Astros were boring. And if you liked Enos Cabell, hoo boy.)
Fair enough. Thanks for the bday wishes; it was a couple of weeks ago. As you can tell, I am older but no smarter.
So what sort of odds would you lay on convicting Curley and/or Schultz, assuming that they don't immunize one to testify against the other?
i had read the 12/11/11 paterno defense - forgotten about it. one of those make my blood pressure go up thingy
James took it upon himself to write a 6,000+ word article very strongly defending Paterno, published December 11, 2011.
IIRC, the week the whole Sandusky scandal first broke someone asked a question in the "Hey Bill" mailbag and James made his original response - which began him on this course. There were some follow up questions. Then I guess he wrote article you note above. I didn't know about that one - is it behind his paywall?
It was a place-holder for a comment from somebody else.
I'd offer DN a Coke, but would he take a handout?
as long as it's not a supersized Slurpee, Mayor
Bobby Fischer says: "Hello."
Jumps right off the page in the context of the PSU case. Analogs:
- "Everybody in the South" = All the people who bought into the popular explanation of Paterno's culpability and whose emotions are now engaged, pulling them "toward the explanation [they] choose to believe"
- "Filthy, drunken, semi-illterate black criminal telling a story that doesn't match the known facts in one particular after another" = the popular press
- "Clean, white, sober upstanding and respectable factory supervisor whose only real story was that he had no idea what had happened?" = Joe Paterno
- Voice of truth and justice Bill James = Voice of truth and justice Bill James
Seeing how he addresses a lot of the cases in the book, I think he believes he's got this whole judge-and-jury thing down, and he's whiffed a bit too much of his own exhaust. Plus he's moved from decades- or centuries-old cases to something where the emotions are still raw.
I'm not sure how offensive this is because it's so absolutely insane. It reads like the ravings of a madman trying to justify his own crimes.
He is really not letting this go. I almost perversely admire his stubbornness.
Still, from day one, James was a Bagwell fan. See for instance his comment in the 1995 Player Rating Book: "... I always thought I was Bagwell's biggest fan, but I never dreamed he would do this." The year before he says, "... If I were to draw up a list of five players with the best chance to be the National League MVP in 1994, Bagwell would certainly be on the list. He's only 25, hits for average and power, will take a walk, surprisingly good baserunner and exceptional defensive first baseman."
BBC you're quite simply wrong about James and Bagwell. The next time he writes something less than positive about Bagwell (as noted, he rated him #4) will be the first.
At least he's acknowledging that the Freeh report does not support his interpretation of events. I mean, I still disagree with him, but at least he's being more consistent now.
backdoor Godwin--touche
It's morally revolting. Perhaps marginally less so than his current ravings because it was written before the Freeh Report. Then again, as J. Zeth pointed out in #378, he's treating the Freeh Report in much the same manner as those "Loose Change" a**holes treated the 9/11 Commission's report, so he's doubling down.
Why the hell does Bill James feel compelled to destroy his reputation on behalf of Joe Paterno? There has to be more to it than just the "contrarian" schtick, no?
EDIT: Oh, and late-breaking Primey for #381.
You see, the question worth discussing, to Bill James, isn't whether Paterno is morally or legally responsible for allowing Sandusky to prey upon little boys for a decade. No, the question we need to focus on is whether PSU harmed the great man's legacy. Ye gods.
Thanks for the link. (starts reading it). Life it too short to get through this.
it should have been
That's exactly my feeling. Good grief. This is 10,000 miles beyond the "somebody stuck a microphone in his face" point. 10,000 miles into la-la-land. I'm kind of creeping out.
I feel authentically angry after finishing this fetid, steaming piece of tripe. BBTF is a place where hyperbole is overused, and I'm a major offender, but I really don't think I'm using hyperbole when I say that I will never be able to read Bill James' material again the same way.
And it's not for reasons of moral outrage either, really. It's because stuff like this simply calls into question, for me, the reliability and trustworthiness of James as a guide. Perhaps I can tell myself that, so long as James sticks to quantitative things, he's still okay.
I agree with the idea that "Pass" was not a dis on Bagwell, though I can imagine that it might have seemed like it....
Dare failed.
I thought that was the one redeeming quality. "Mr. Grand Jury" was of minor amusement.
Although it's almost worth it in part because of the sheer batshit insanity of, as JJ1986 pointed out, James inserting quasi-stage directions (rather, trying to make it read like his goofy misconception of what a trial transcript would look like) throughout the thing. At one point, he even has the Grand Jury speak as "Mr. Grand Jury" [!!!] Like, is there a reason James thought it was necessary to have the judge adjourn the court for a couple hours so that his stupid 10-minute long 'closing argument' could be read on the next day?
Oh, and you gotta love how the PROSECUTOR (who is, get this, not prosecuting Paterno but rather prosecuting Penn State for tarring Paterno's reputation -- again, it's the morally gobsmacking framing device that rankles above all) gets to make a closing argument...but the so-called defense must remain mute.
And I have to agree with what other people above have written: it makes it impossible to take any non-quantitative claim that Bill James has ever made seriously. He previously beclowned himself with his analysis of the Dowd Report, but at the time that seemed like a one-time thing. But now?
Well played, sir. Especially if the 'n' where I expected a 'k' was intentional.
They did, but your weakest man on campus faced them down, Bill.
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