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Message: [QUOTE="A Clockwork Orange, post: 4317493, member: 16"] Everything everyone is saying is true. [LIST] [*]There is more time and more emphasis on youth and secondary football in the south. [*]Rural areas that have no professional rooting interest find their fandom in the high school and college teams nearby. [*]Since football is not embedded into the mindset of those in the Northeast from birth, the CTE stuff becomes more troublesome and it's easier to choose other sports. [/LIST] But, I think it's also important to look at the outlier in the Northeast, not the norm. That outlier is Penn State. Yes, it's more rural than Rutgers, Pitt, BC, and even Syracuse - but it's still quite close (closer in fact) to NFL teams than SU is. The difference is JoePa. I don't like the dude and anything that he stands for, but his rise started in 1966 and stayed pretty much unmatched until his horrific and disgusting downfall in 2011. He is the SOLE reason Penn State football is what it is. His winning, and his cult of personality centered around "doing it the right way" enveloped the entire university and region. A quote from James Franklin stood out in that article. He said: [I]"If you want to win at the very highest level, there's really not one area that you can say, well, we don't have to compete in that area. You have to compete in every area -- facilities, recruiting, coaching salaries, staff size. Every single area. You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and fight in every area."[/I] While SU went through Schwartzwalder, Maloney, Coach Mac, Coach P., Greg Robinson, and then Doug Marrone, Penn State had one singular driving force: Joe Paterno. He eclipsed everyone at Penn State. Anything he needed, he got. He was the institution. Despite all the things happening around the Northeast at that time as the populace gravitated slowly away from college football, JoePa wielded unrivaled power, and through that power created an empire that survived the sea change. SU was lucky that it invested in the dome, and then had a run of two very solid coaches in the 80s and 90s. The rotting foundation went unnoticed and the coaches didn't exert or have enough political will to get the university to invest significantly in the product. They didn't do everything on every level as Franklin alludes to above. JoePa did. There are certainly parallels to be explored between Paterno's force of will and Coach Boeheim's on the basketball side. In the end though, while I hate JoePa with every ounce of my being, he is the architect of Penn State's rabid following and continued relevance in college football. In an alternate universe he would have been fired in 1969 and the Penn State we know today would not exist. [/QUOTE]

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