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Message: [QUOTE="Cusefan95, post: 4719548, member: 173"] I lived in Bellfonte, PA about a ten minute drive from Beaver Stadium for nearly a decade, so dealt with Penn State fans a lot. Fairly early in that decade was the Sandusky trial. My take on a bunch of things: 1) Most fans would prefer to have an actual rival...they kinda tried to turn Wisconsin into a "rival" which ran into the issue that Minnesota is Wisconsin's biggest rival and isn't being displaced by PSU. Its less true that a rivalry means little to PSU, more accurate to say they've accepted they don't have one, and have no route to one - so why obsess over it? 2) I think every game in the B10 has some kind of trophy attached to it at this point - which is an inauthentic, inorganic effort to create rivalries. I didn't know of any fan who cared. 3) Non-PSU fans who throw stuff like "its a creepy cult" and PSU should have gotten the death penalty have created a weird dynamic. Since I lived right there and was capable of not pontificating about my moral superiority, I had lots of honest conversations. I think most fans were horrified by what happened since they were always the "school that did things the right way" - but when outsiders started advocating for the death penalty (or people like on this board were saying the school should be shut down) - it led to an "us against them" mentality which persists to this day. If fans here recall back how they reacted when the Bernie Fine story broke and fans across the country acted as if Syracuse fans were p*do enablers, we're not fundamentally that different. Our reactions were basically the same. What's different in the Penn State case is its gone on for a decade, they know the over the top negative opinion exists - and simply don't care anymore. You think they should have gotten the death penalty (or are a cult)? Their take is that's fine, you're simply the enemy who has no more moral standing than them and you can go yourself. Its a microcosm of the cultural climate in the country, where the goal seems to be to convince yourself you're more moral than the "other", and villify and attack them as enemies. Over the last decade I've grown to have much more contempt for the "Penn State should have gotten the death penalty", "Penn State is a cult" crowd than I have for Penn State and their fans - because frankly they/you are a much bigger part of the problem and reason why the US is tearing itself apart than PSU was or is. Feel free to argue and pontificate on what a wonderful, awesome, moral person you are and how my opinion revolts you. Because at this point I'm with the PSU fans - you can go yourself. [/QUOTE]

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