Insiders, Outsiders, and Penn State

As a sports fan, I enjoy reading baseball blogs. That's not what this post is about, so hang on a second. One of the interesting things about sports blogs is that, in general, they do not have the inside access to a team in the way that a beat writer for a local newspaper does. Since the bloggers don't have direct access to players, the good ones typically rely on statistical tools or video breakdowns in order to make their points. Historically, the professionals have dismissed the work of the outsiders. This is one of the key elements of the Moneyball story.

In the last week, you may have read or heard about the incidents at Penn State University. In case you're unfamiliar, a Grand Jury investigation found that a former coach in the football program had been sexually abusing eight young boys over a 15-year period. Certain personnel at the University became aware of this by finding the coach in the act, including a graduate assistant, who reported the incident to the head coach of the football program, Joe Paterno, who in turn reported it to the athletic director. The Grand Jury investigation also showed that nobody from Penn State University reported what they knew to any officials, which by the way is mandatory. The University sanctioned the coach, though the athletic director admitted to the Grand Jury that such sanctions were "unenforceable."

If you want more detail on the case, you can read the wikipedia page or you can read the Grand Jury's Findings of Fact at this link. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not in fact read the Findings in their entirety.

Now back to the point of this post.


We rely on the "insiders," the journalists, to give us a feel for who these people are that we root for. You'll notice I only named one of the people involved in my above paragraph, the head coach of the Penn State football program, Joe Paterno. The problem is, I'm not sure that's actually his name. If you've followed sports for a long time, you might think his full name is "The Legendary Joe Paterno." He is affectionately referred to as "JoePa" by a lot of folks, including the author of this article, published today on ESPN.

Paterno is the winningest coach in the history of college football. He had been the head coach for football at Penn State since 1966 before being fired last week for his connection with the findings from the Grand Jury investigation regarding child sex abuses of his former defensive coordinator.

He has done a series of good-to-great things, including --as it said in that article above-- raising $13 million for an extension of the library there at Penn State. That's all well and good. He has definitely received his recognition for his positive contributions. But now its time for him and everyone else to eat their words when they said that he did everything "the right way."

Joe Paterno was fired last week, and Penn State basically erupted. Good Morning America covered it. You can see people overturning a television van not even 10 seconds into the video. People were protesting his firing, although if the Grand Jury investigation was accurate, what Paterno did was far beyond a fireable offense (though I do wish to be clear that he did not directly commit the acts himself).

I have to ask, does this protest occur if the media doesn't pump up "Legendary" coach Joe Paterno? Clearly, Paterno was a large recruiting tool to the university for football players, but I would submit that it reaches farther than that. I have to argue that repeatedly pumping up a person in the way that the media did -- and I'll even say that they did so with decent reason -- creates this kind of fanatic atmosphere in which people do not think critically about what's going on. In this case it's even worse because colleges are fairly self-selecting environments; if you don't buy into the narrative about the coach, you're less likely to be a student there than someone who does.

Not to mention that This American Life did a show about Penn State's status as America's number one "Party School," back in 2009.

The "insiders" of Moneyball were quick to dismiss the "outsider" tactics used by Billy Beane which came from strategies suggested by the independent Bill James. When things like this incident at Penn State come to light, we may want to remind ourselves that the "insiders" need dismissing sometimes, too.