On BWI, a Pitt poster started a respectful post about Penn State's rep around the country, and not surprisingly, it led to quite a response. None of us are permitted to respond on their board, so Chris, please allow us to respond here, since this is about Pitt.
One PSU poster asked this question of the Pitt OP about Pitt's reaction if it had suffered the Sandusky child sex scandal:
Suppose this would have happened to Pitt? What would your fanbase, alums, students, faculty, staff have done? We have united as a group (by and large) to stand up for our University and Joe Paterno. Would you have done the same for yours?
This is not some obscure hypothetical that is difficult to answer; it is easy to take the PSU events and imagine they happened to us. I strongly believe that my response here is not some 20/20 hindsight best face answer,but is one that it accurately reflects what the overwhelming majority of Pitt fans and alums would have done at the time.
Yes, we would have stood up for our university. But, we would not have defended the actions and inactions of the individuals involved. We would have condemned them as much as everyone else, maybe more so. We would have defended the university as being much more and much better than the behavior associated with this horrific incident.
But we absolutely would not have run to the defense of our coach. We would expect that he would be immediately fired, and if he wasn't, we would demand it. One could try to claim that the comparison isn't fair since we haven't had a football coach with a long tenure of success. But we wouldn't defend Dixon either, a coach who is a PItt lifer and is very well liked and highly regarded as a person, and who has been successful for long time. He's a coach who took our program out of obscurity and brought it national respect and achieved one of the best winning percentages in the country. If he coaches another 10 years here, he will probably be regarded as our greatest coach of all time in any sport.
The reason we wouldn't defend him in this situation, is that we would accept the facts, and because we simply DON'T WORSHIP COACHES. Our egos are not intertwined with those of our coaches, so if they fall, we don't fall with them. We will never look at any coach anywhere close to the way Penn Staters chose to look at Paterno. Dixon is a successful coach who runs a clean program and who's kids graduate, but we don't regard him as representing all that is right in the world. We admire him and we're glad he's our coach, but he's just a coach. And we understand, no matter how passionate we may be about Pitt football and basketball, we know that sports is, as Myron Cope used to say, "in the toy department of life".
We would supporting rather than attacking our BOT if they fired all involved, as we would get that it would be important to put immediate distance between the university and the individuals involved. We would oppose, not support, personal lawsuits by those fired against the university, because the university would come first, not a sports program or a sports coach.
I'm very sure that most Pitt fans would take this approach.
This post was edited on 2/27 10:11 AM by raleighpanther
One PSU poster asked this question of the Pitt OP about Pitt's reaction if it had suffered the Sandusky child sex scandal:
Suppose this would have happened to Pitt? What would your fanbase, alums, students, faculty, staff have done? We have united as a group (by and large) to stand up for our University and Joe Paterno. Would you have done the same for yours?
This is not some obscure hypothetical that is difficult to answer; it is easy to take the PSU events and imagine they happened to us. I strongly believe that my response here is not some 20/20 hindsight best face answer,but is one that it accurately reflects what the overwhelming majority of Pitt fans and alums would have done at the time.
Yes, we would have stood up for our university. But, we would not have defended the actions and inactions of the individuals involved. We would have condemned them as much as everyone else, maybe more so. We would have defended the university as being much more and much better than the behavior associated with this horrific incident.
But we absolutely would not have run to the defense of our coach. We would expect that he would be immediately fired, and if he wasn't, we would demand it. One could try to claim that the comparison isn't fair since we haven't had a football coach with a long tenure of success. But we wouldn't defend Dixon either, a coach who is a PItt lifer and is very well liked and highly regarded as a person, and who has been successful for long time. He's a coach who took our program out of obscurity and brought it national respect and achieved one of the best winning percentages in the country. If he coaches another 10 years here, he will probably be regarded as our greatest coach of all time in any sport.
The reason we wouldn't defend him in this situation, is that we would accept the facts, and because we simply DON'T WORSHIP COACHES. Our egos are not intertwined with those of our coaches, so if they fall, we don't fall with them. We will never look at any coach anywhere close to the way Penn Staters chose to look at Paterno. Dixon is a successful coach who runs a clean program and who's kids graduate, but we don't regard him as representing all that is right in the world. We admire him and we're glad he's our coach, but he's just a coach. And we understand, no matter how passionate we may be about Pitt football and basketball, we know that sports is, as Myron Cope used to say, "in the toy department of life".
We would supporting rather than attacking our BOT if they fired all involved, as we would get that it would be important to put immediate distance between the university and the individuals involved. We would oppose, not support, personal lawsuits by those fired against the university, because the university would come first, not a sports program or a sports coach.
I'm very sure that most Pitt fans would take this approach.
This post was edited on 2/27 10:11 AM by raleighpanther
