CIL
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- Aug 14, 2011
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If you look back at the threads when the Fine situation first broke you'll see a lot of us here calling for JB to be fired before knowing all the fact (compare that with the continued deification of Paterno by a huge part of the fan base), a substantial portion of our fans here saying that if things turned out to be true and SU covered up for Bernie for all those years that we should voluntarily shut the program down for a year or two and come back with a completely different staff and start over. We had posters here chastising the people worried about basketball. There was genuine concern that the University covered up the incident to protect Bernie.
I have no idea how much of that was real and how much of that was simply not wanting to look like the Penn State fan base, but the tenor here versus their message boards was night and day.
And if Bernie was raping boys at the 96 Final Four a year or so after he was caught showering with a ball boy and still allowed to travel with young boys in his hotel room...and then was caught by Hop raping a boy in the shower at Manley after he got a golden parachute retirement...and then allowed to continue to bring boys to SU basketball games and use his SU connections to rape more boys...then yes, I think a lot of us here would want all those games from 96 vacated. If JB were as depraved a human being as Joe Paterno he wouldn't deserve to retire with 900+ wins. There would be anger and hurt feelings, but I think we would ultimately come to accept some scholarship reductions and a four year post season ban. A $60,000,000 fine would be catastrophic to Syracuse though.
This might be wishful thinking, but I think this board in particular would ultimately shout down any apologists and anyone who claimed that we as fans and alumni were victims. Except for after bad losses, we're mostly a pretty reasonable, informed and intelligent group. Look at the PSU R and S boards and you'll see a collection of people that are incredibly ill informed as to when and where "due process" applies along with the other basic legal concepts surrounding their current situation. I'd also venture to say that very few, if any, of the posters here measure their self-worth by SU's success on the basketball court. You can see that a lot of the PSU internet community really does seem to believe that their life will be significantly worse if they football team sucks. They seem dismissive of the opinions of people from schools with lesser football traditions that are trying to engage them in conversation.
The part of me that's a Syracuse fan would be depressed over a winter without SU basketball. Hopefully that part of me would be completely shot down by the part of me that realized that the only victims are the boys whose lives were essentially stolen from them.
And here, if you feel like perusing, is the first major thread about Bernie:
http://syracusefan.com/threads/bernie-fine-is-someone-playing-a-joke.7905/
I think you overestimating our board. By a longshot.