It's all personal at Penn State

I'm going to guess that LaVar Arrington and Brandon Short are not stupid human beings, at least not so stupid that they don't understand something bad happened at their beloved Penn State University.

So how do you explain this reaction to hiring Bill O'Brien as the school's new football coach?

“I will put my Butkus [Award] in storage. I will put my Alamo Bowl MVP trophy in storage,” Arrington told the Penn State Rivals.com website, BlueWhite Illustrated. “Jerseys, anything Penn State, in storage. Wherever Tom Bradley goes, that’s the school I will start to put memorabilia up in my home. I’m done. I’m done with Penn State. If they’re done with us, I’m done with them."

 "Penn State is a family and it is real and if they choose to get rid of Bradley and not hire a Penn State coach, then they’ve turned their backs on our entire family,” Short said.

And how do you explain some Penn State students, who I'm also going to assume aren't stupid, rioting after Joe Paterno was fired?



The answer is that it's all about them.

Let's go back to Arrington and Short for a minute.

“By these people making the decisions the way that they are making them, basically coinciding with everything that’s being written about our university, if they get rid of Tom Bradley, that means they, in essence, have accepted the fact that we are all guilty,” Arrington said.

"Penn State is a family and it is real and if they choose to get rid of Bradley and not hire a Penn State coach, then they’ve turned their backs on our entire family,” Short said.

By hiring an "outsider," Arrington and Short feel betrayed. Any "insider" they could have hired would be connected to Paterno -- the man they likely credit with making them who they are -- so by not hiring someone already connected with the program, Paterno's program, it diminishes Paterno ... and therefore diminishes them.

As for the students, it's actually another former player, D.J. Dozier, who sums it up with his complaints about the O'Brien hiring.

'Dozier said, 'It’s politics, it’s fall out, it’s everything that has nothing to do with a program and continuing to build a solid program.'"

Even though there's a Penn State alum who has been in the news a lot lately for reasons other than football, the college is defined almost entirely by its football team. If you see a kid wearing a Penn State sweatshirt, you think about the football team. If you ask a kid where he or she goes to school and Penn State is the answer, it registers with you because you know about the football team.

The football team in general, and Joe Paterno in particular, made Penn State relevant. And therefore, it made Penn State students relevant ... even if they had no aptitude for or interest in football.

So if anything makes Penn State football less relevant, it makes the college less relevant ... which makes them less relevant.

Now, that's probably what was not going through their minds when they rioted, but that's why they did it.