Thanks. It is great to be here, it is great to be back in South Jersey and among so many loyal Penn Staters.

It is always great to have a chance to talk to a room full of Penn Staters. We share a common home, and a common history.

Many of us are old enough to recall doing a Case Study at….The Skellar. Some older vintage alums probably recall the Phi Psi 500 or The Regatta or even Gentle Thursday. You have to be a certain age to remember $1 pitcher night at the Den or 10 cent wings at the G-Man or even $5 all you can eat pizza and beer at The Brewery. That was all part of the education we reveled in that took place outside the classroom.

I am fortunate that I still live in State College so that part of my life and the memories are refreshed when I pass Fiji, or Chi Phi or Pika or South Halls where Chi-O and Tri-Delt were located or Pollock Halls where the Thetas and Pi Phis lived….

The memories are so fresh it is like you can still touch them. Fall is the time of nostalgia.

Autumn is always electric in State College. The first cold snap on a fall night reminds me of long ago days walking to a party or home from the stadium after another win, seeing my breath as I exhale passing under the glow of a streetlight. If it was an early game I recall walking down McKee Street where my parents’ home is and the sunlight falling through the arched branches that looked like a vaulted cathedral ceiling—the leaves providing a canopy of gold, red, orange and browns.

Penn State is home. Even for those who no longer live there it is a home that harbors some of our life’s sweetest memories. It draws out a connection to the place and to each other that evokes love of place, love of self and love of each other and loyalty to the school and to the values that have been espoused by great men and women at the University across the generations.

You can take any given point in time and stand astride the intersection of your history and your future, your yesterdays and your tomorrows. History is a finite thing, what has happened is done and can never be undone. As for tomorrow, tomorrow is neither known nor promised to anyone.

But these are interesting times in College football. The game is bigger in many ways than it has ever been. On television it is everywhere on ESPN, ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN 2, ESPN News, Fox Sports 1, The Big Ten Network, The SEC Network, the Pac-12 Network….and I could go on and on. Television dollars are driving the schedules of the games and driving the increases in revenue.

The cost of doing business in big-time college sports is accelerating. College coaching salaries have escalated well beyond the rate of inflation. In 1994 Coach Phil Fulmer signed a contract for $1 million a year; the first publicly known contract to surpass that barrier.

Today salaries routinely cross the $3.5 million threshold and have topped out near the $7 million a year range. While the NCAA  limits the size of coaching staffs, schools find exceptions and loopholes and staff sizes have ballooned .

Beyond that the headlines about College Football are more and more about money—how much money the playoff will generate, how many T.V. dollars are coming in, big money buy-ins for season tickets, growing revenues and paying players.

It is tenuous balance. For years there was a belief in an imperfect amateur system that sought to education young men that were true student-athletes. The fan base is starting to see the little man that is behind the Wizard of Oz curtain. If they ever lose faith the sport is in real trouble. The impatience we have for coaches fuels instability. It pushes coaches to cut corners and adopt a win-at-all costs mentality.

The losers in that scenario will be the student-athletes.

Today the average head coach in Big-time football has been at his school less than 3 ½ years—not even enough time to have recruited and developed a senior class.

To navigate this future will require visionary leadership across the board and from the NCAA but given recent actions by the current NCAA leader, I am not holding my breath.

That same leadership destroyed a shining example, a noble if imperfect story of how to win at the highest level running a program that was focused on the long-term academic and athletic welfare of student-athletes.

In life there are great examples in history from which we may draw the lessons needed to build a stronger future in even the most challenging times. Penn State from 1887 until 2011 was that history lesson—what should be seen as a Shining City on the Hill.

History is a finite thing as I mentioned earlier. However, despite the finite nature of history, the truth in its telling is malleable and subject to the spin of those who control the levers of power. We learned that in George Orwell’s book 1984 when we saw inside the Ministry of Truth and watched them falsify historical events to create approved versions of the present.

​

As Penn Staters we find ourselves and our University in the grips of those who forged a history to justify what they have done to our school. They hoped we’d all go away. They underestimated the love so many of us feel for our school.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote to John Adams about the Tories who were trying to squash the rebellion that is the foundation of the nation we live in today: “We have been too careless of our future reputation, while our Tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong.”

We’ve seen that firsthand. They called us JoeBots but they didn’t realize that this was never about Joe; it was about Penn State. Now they call us Truthers but they didn’t realize that we’d wear Truther as a badge of honor because we do not fear the truth. Those who fear the Truth do so only because they have something to hide.

This fight isn’t easy.

It would be easier to give up the past. To smile and put the events of the past in our rearview mirror and move forward pretending that all that has happened has been adequately explained away with phony reports and checks written to any number of lawyers/pr firms and victims ---most of whom were in no way the responsibility of Penn State.

But you see as William Faulkner once said “The past is never dead. If fact it’s not even past.”

The memories of our time at Penn State are as alive in us now as they have ever been.

At Penn State we’ve been asked to pretend that a good part of a Proud past never existed but if we do acknowledge its existence, we should only speak of it the hushed tones of the shamed.

Again there are those who will roll their eyes and say “Move on” or “who cares?” or “why does this matter?”

I’ll tell you why this matters. The past is what gives our future the roots to grow higher and spread further than we ever could on our own. It is tradition, it is who and what we are, have been, and will be.

The Great Historian David McCullough recently wrote: “We are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate. We can't function in a society if we don't know who we are and where we came from. A nation that forgets its past can function no better than a person with amnesia."

We cannot function without our past. We cannot carry the honor and pride that was earned by so much sacrifice by so many great men and women who competed in every sport and did things the right way.

The key to the future is indeed our past.

A few weeks ago on ESPN’s College Gameday they were discussing the removal of the bowl ban and the reinstatement of the scholarships. One host stated that the sanctions should not be lifted because “Penn State’s football program committed the most egregious acts ever committed by a football program.”

Last I checked Penn State’s program did not commit any of the egregious acts wrongly attributed to us. But that narrative was given to him by our administration.

Why does that matter?—Do you know how many high school recruits watch ESPN’s College Game Day? How many parents of recruits were watching? That narrative is a drag on us all and it becomes a topic that is in the minds of anyone considering Penn State.