Saw this earlier in the morning, since no one has posted, I decided to give it a view on the B-W rivals board.
Penn State Football: JVP, OB, CJF and the BOT
by Mike Poorman on February 26, 2017 10:00 PM
James Franklin. Photo by Paul Burdick, StateCollege.com
Click photo for gallery
James Franklin spoke at the Penn State Board of Trustees' meeting on Friday.
It was only the third time in the 162-year history of the university -- the last 130 of those with a football team on campus -- that a Penn State football coach has formally addressed the board.
And the first time that the invited coach did not admonish it.
In some ways, you could see that as a sign of progress.
JOE AND THE BOARD
The first head coach who addressed the board, Joe Paterno, did so on Jan. 22, 1983, not long after the Nittany Lions won their first national championship. Joe, who was invited to receive a resolution from the Board of Trustees, had power and used the occasion to make a point, publicly:
It's about time we had a university that the football team, newly-crowned as No. 1, could be proud of. Many of the professors are lazy, the board is stagnant and there's no time like the present to capitalize on the football team's top-ranked status. So let's start raising money. Now.
As I wrote back in 2013, Paterno lectured the board, using many of his 2,488 words to speak broadly of the university’s failings and to roundly criticize the board. And he did so in an open forum. To wit, just nine sentences into his stern lecture he said:
“You know, obviously, all of us are disappointed in the newspaper reports that some of our academic departments are not rated very high. That bothers me,” said Paterno, who died 29 years to the day after making his remarks in 1983. “It bothers me to see Penn State football be No. 1 and then to pick up a newspaper several weeks later and find we don’t have many of our disciplines that are rated up there with other institutions in the country.”
Then he got personal.
With the faculty: “We also have some departments that are absolutely lousy and we have lazy profs who are only concerned with tenure and only concerned with getting tenure for some of their mediocre colleagues.”
And with the board: “Basically, this board is in a lot of ways reactionary because you are more conservative than anything else. That is not a criticism of you as individuals, but I think that’s a fair criticism of The Pennsylvania State University Board of Trustees for the 33 years I have known them… We need more controversy, we need more freedom, we need more people to come to us with different ideas, we need more minorities…”
Bottom-line, though, this is why Paterno faced the straitlaced, stodgy, mostly white, male and middle-aged trustees and told them it was time to buck up: Money, as in a first-ever major fund-raising campaign.
“We canʼt wait. ... We can only hold up our finger as No. 1 for six more months and then we have to play the game again and we may not be No. 1. Six short months to capture this magic moment. We have to raise $7 to $10 million bucks...” Paterno preached.
The board listened. Football was already a cash cow and now, with a national title under his belt, Paterno’s urging that PSU milk being No. 1 for all its worth came to fruition. A year after the address, the university launched “The Campaign for Penn State,” with Paterno’s very close friend and Wall Street titan Bill Schreyer – the Terry Pegula of his day when it came to donations – serving as chair and Paterno himself serving as vice chair and chief arm-twister. Six years later, Penn State had raised 50 times Paterno’s original goal, for a final war chest of $352 million.
BILL AND THE BOARD
Thirty-and-a-half years later, Bill O'Brien -- the first permanent head coach after Paterno who was, like JVP, a Brown alum -- used a PowerPoint when he spoke to the board. And spoke loudly. As an invited guest to the meeting, held at the Fayette campus on July 12, 2013, O'Brien covered three major points in a close-doored session (that some media saw through glass-paneled doors; transparency of another sort, one might say) that lasted for over an hour:
One, stop the personal lawsuits against the NCAA -- in O'Brien's eyes and ears on the road, they were hurting recruiting. Two, Penn State was aiming for a reduction in NCAA sanctions. And three, pony up some money to market football, the financial lifeblood of the athletic department.
The next day, Centre Daily Times reporter Mike Dawson, who was outside the meeting room as O'Brien spoke, wrote that "...one of the presentation slides had the heading 'potential proposal to modify sanctions' and another had a heading concerning the impact of the scholarship reductions that are part of the sanctions.
"Another slide," Dawson wrote, "read 'Individual lawsuits do not help us!' with the words 'do not' underlined and in capital letters. That slide said the the lawsuits would discourage the NCAA from working with the Penn State to modify the consent decree. The lawsuits would result in 'bad press,' the slide read."
Two months later, the NCAA did indeed ease its scholarship limits against Penn State, the first step in a series of reductions of its original onerous sanctions. How much credit for that goes to OB and his BOT lecture that day remains to be seen. But, the results would seem to tell us it didn't hurt.
A week later, in a press conference to announce Penn State's 2014 season-opener against Central Florida in Ireland -- a game O'Brien never coached -- he said the following of his presentation to the board:
"I was invited down to the Board of Trustees to present to them the sanctions and my thoughts on the sanctions. I have been asked many, many questions over the last 19 months about the sanctions so I accepted the invitation and I went down there. I don’t have anything to hide; I just want to do what’s right for these kids and this football program."
JAMES AND THE BOARD
Franklin, in a public appearance Friday that was a surprise to some board members, spoke to the group of the football team's successes, on the field and in the community and in the classroom. He didn't challenge the board. The closest he got was at the tail end of his 888-word speech, when he said, 'Now is the time for us to forge ahead, to take advantage of the momentum, the opportunities that we have in the future."
From there, Franklin finished by saying twice that he was "honored and humbled" to appear before the board.
The crux of Franklin's remarks was twofold:
"Our accomplishments this season, they were not just a result of one person or one player or one position but rather the collective efforts of each individual on this team, each individual within our university and our entire Penn State community. Our success this season is your success. We're a direct reflection of everybody within this room, everyone on this campus and everyone within the state. Thank you for the support, thank you for the patience.
And:
"First and foremost, however, I wanted to assure you our mission at Penn State has not changed and will not change. Forge strong relationships with the players, the university, our community. Create tremendous academic experience. Our job is not to send these guys to the NFL, which stands for 'not for long.' Our job is to make sure our guys leave as educated men and prepared for life. We want to make a positive impact in our community and want to be able to consistently compete for Big Ten divisional conference championships, conference championships and national championships..."
In essence, 34 years, two national championships and a scandal later, the message had turned 180 degrees: We are a football team the university can be proud of.
Not saying that wasn't the case for the 419 games games Penn State played in the time between Joe and James' speeches. If anything, that message has been consistent, including the two years Bill was at the helm.
But the circumstances are different. Power is concentrated and distributed in other manners.
When Paterno spoke, John Oswald was about to retire as president, to be succeeded by Bryce Jordan. Paterno had just finished a stint as athletic director after masterminding a move of the athletic department out of the College of Health and Physical Education into a unit all by its lonesome. His closet colleague, Jim Tarman, had recently succeeded him as A.D.
When O'Brien made his comments, Rodney Erickson was a lame duck, basically a temporary president. Same goes for the athletic director, Dave Joyner. Penn State was in a huge time of transition. O'Brien tried hard to fill the void, even volunteering at one point to take on a role as co-athletic director. (To which Erickson replied, No thanks.)
Franklin was hired by Erickson and Joyner. The relationship he has with his current bosses -- president Eric Barron and athletic director Sandy Barbour -- is neither cozy (like Paterno) nor quite contentious (like O'Brien). Franklin has power, but it's hard to imagine him taking the board to the woodshed. (To the bank? Now, that's a different story). Both his bosses are facing fund-raising campaigns the size of which Paterno, who managed a $8 million athletic department budget when he was athletic director in the early 1980s, could have never, ever managed.
Franklin is not an icon. And no matter how many challenges he's faced, he's not Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction -- “I’m Winston Wolf...I solve problems” -- to the degree that O'Brien was.
Franklin’s appearance on Friday underscored all that.
Indeed, in word and in 11-3 deed, he’s the football coach. And one, that in his own way, has united the Penn State community.
Penn State Football: JVP, OB, CJF and the BOT
by Mike Poorman on February 26, 2017 10:00 PM
James Franklin. Photo by Paul Burdick, StateCollege.com
Click photo for gallery
James Franklin spoke at the Penn State Board of Trustees' meeting on Friday.
It was only the third time in the 162-year history of the university -- the last 130 of those with a football team on campus -- that a Penn State football coach has formally addressed the board.
And the first time that the invited coach did not admonish it.
In some ways, you could see that as a sign of progress.
JOE AND THE BOARD
The first head coach who addressed the board, Joe Paterno, did so on Jan. 22, 1983, not long after the Nittany Lions won their first national championship. Joe, who was invited to receive a resolution from the Board of Trustees, had power and used the occasion to make a point, publicly:
It's about time we had a university that the football team, newly-crowned as No. 1, could be proud of. Many of the professors are lazy, the board is stagnant and there's no time like the present to capitalize on the football team's top-ranked status. So let's start raising money. Now.
As I wrote back in 2013, Paterno lectured the board, using many of his 2,488 words to speak broadly of the university’s failings and to roundly criticize the board. And he did so in an open forum. To wit, just nine sentences into his stern lecture he said:
“You know, obviously, all of us are disappointed in the newspaper reports that some of our academic departments are not rated very high. That bothers me,” said Paterno, who died 29 years to the day after making his remarks in 1983. “It bothers me to see Penn State football be No. 1 and then to pick up a newspaper several weeks later and find we don’t have many of our disciplines that are rated up there with other institutions in the country.”
Then he got personal.
With the faculty: “We also have some departments that are absolutely lousy and we have lazy profs who are only concerned with tenure and only concerned with getting tenure for some of their mediocre colleagues.”
And with the board: “Basically, this board is in a lot of ways reactionary because you are more conservative than anything else. That is not a criticism of you as individuals, but I think that’s a fair criticism of The Pennsylvania State University Board of Trustees for the 33 years I have known them… We need more controversy, we need more freedom, we need more people to come to us with different ideas, we need more minorities…”
Bottom-line, though, this is why Paterno faced the straitlaced, stodgy, mostly white, male and middle-aged trustees and told them it was time to buck up: Money, as in a first-ever major fund-raising campaign.
“We canʼt wait. ... We can only hold up our finger as No. 1 for six more months and then we have to play the game again and we may not be No. 1. Six short months to capture this magic moment. We have to raise $7 to $10 million bucks...” Paterno preached.
The board listened. Football was already a cash cow and now, with a national title under his belt, Paterno’s urging that PSU milk being No. 1 for all its worth came to fruition. A year after the address, the university launched “The Campaign for Penn State,” with Paterno’s very close friend and Wall Street titan Bill Schreyer – the Terry Pegula of his day when it came to donations – serving as chair and Paterno himself serving as vice chair and chief arm-twister. Six years later, Penn State had raised 50 times Paterno’s original goal, for a final war chest of $352 million.
BILL AND THE BOARD
Thirty-and-a-half years later, Bill O'Brien -- the first permanent head coach after Paterno who was, like JVP, a Brown alum -- used a PowerPoint when he spoke to the board. And spoke loudly. As an invited guest to the meeting, held at the Fayette campus on July 12, 2013, O'Brien covered three major points in a close-doored session (that some media saw through glass-paneled doors; transparency of another sort, one might say) that lasted for over an hour:
One, stop the personal lawsuits against the NCAA -- in O'Brien's eyes and ears on the road, they were hurting recruiting. Two, Penn State was aiming for a reduction in NCAA sanctions. And three, pony up some money to market football, the financial lifeblood of the athletic department.
The next day, Centre Daily Times reporter Mike Dawson, who was outside the meeting room as O'Brien spoke, wrote that "...one of the presentation slides had the heading 'potential proposal to modify sanctions' and another had a heading concerning the impact of the scholarship reductions that are part of the sanctions.
"Another slide," Dawson wrote, "read 'Individual lawsuits do not help us!' with the words 'do not' underlined and in capital letters. That slide said the the lawsuits would discourage the NCAA from working with the Penn State to modify the consent decree. The lawsuits would result in 'bad press,' the slide read."
Two months later, the NCAA did indeed ease its scholarship limits against Penn State, the first step in a series of reductions of its original onerous sanctions. How much credit for that goes to OB and his BOT lecture that day remains to be seen. But, the results would seem to tell us it didn't hurt.
A week later, in a press conference to announce Penn State's 2014 season-opener against Central Florida in Ireland -- a game O'Brien never coached -- he said the following of his presentation to the board:
"I was invited down to the Board of Trustees to present to them the sanctions and my thoughts on the sanctions. I have been asked many, many questions over the last 19 months about the sanctions so I accepted the invitation and I went down there. I don’t have anything to hide; I just want to do what’s right for these kids and this football program."
JAMES AND THE BOARD
Franklin, in a public appearance Friday that was a surprise to some board members, spoke to the group of the football team's successes, on the field and in the community and in the classroom. He didn't challenge the board. The closest he got was at the tail end of his 888-word speech, when he said, 'Now is the time for us to forge ahead, to take advantage of the momentum, the opportunities that we have in the future."
From there, Franklin finished by saying twice that he was "honored and humbled" to appear before the board.
The crux of Franklin's remarks was twofold:
"Our accomplishments this season, they were not just a result of one person or one player or one position but rather the collective efforts of each individual on this team, each individual within our university and our entire Penn State community. Our success this season is your success. We're a direct reflection of everybody within this room, everyone on this campus and everyone within the state. Thank you for the support, thank you for the patience.
And:
"First and foremost, however, I wanted to assure you our mission at Penn State has not changed and will not change. Forge strong relationships with the players, the university, our community. Create tremendous academic experience. Our job is not to send these guys to the NFL, which stands for 'not for long.' Our job is to make sure our guys leave as educated men and prepared for life. We want to make a positive impact in our community and want to be able to consistently compete for Big Ten divisional conference championships, conference championships and national championships..."
In essence, 34 years, two national championships and a scandal later, the message had turned 180 degrees: We are a football team the university can be proud of.
Not saying that wasn't the case for the 419 games games Penn State played in the time between Joe and James' speeches. If anything, that message has been consistent, including the two years Bill was at the helm.
But the circumstances are different. Power is concentrated and distributed in other manners.
When Paterno spoke, John Oswald was about to retire as president, to be succeeded by Bryce Jordan. Paterno had just finished a stint as athletic director after masterminding a move of the athletic department out of the College of Health and Physical Education into a unit all by its lonesome. His closet colleague, Jim Tarman, had recently succeeded him as A.D.
When O'Brien made his comments, Rodney Erickson was a lame duck, basically a temporary president. Same goes for the athletic director, Dave Joyner. Penn State was in a huge time of transition. O'Brien tried hard to fill the void, even volunteering at one point to take on a role as co-athletic director. (To which Erickson replied, No thanks.)
Franklin was hired by Erickson and Joyner. The relationship he has with his current bosses -- president Eric Barron and athletic director Sandy Barbour -- is neither cozy (like Paterno) nor quite contentious (like O'Brien). Franklin has power, but it's hard to imagine him taking the board to the woodshed. (To the bank? Now, that's a different story). Both his bosses are facing fund-raising campaigns the size of which Paterno, who managed a $8 million athletic department budget when he was athletic director in the early 1980s, could have never, ever managed.
Franklin is not an icon. And no matter how many challenges he's faced, he's not Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction -- “I’m Winston Wolf...I solve problems” -- to the degree that O'Brien was.
Franklin’s appearance on Friday underscored all that.
Indeed, in word and in 11-3 deed, he’s the football coach. And one, that in his own way, has united the Penn State community.
