We all want to hold on to at least a bit of the past, if only because we tend to remember the good times a touch more fondly than maybe they actually deserved. James Franklin took on a somewhat wistful tone this week when, speaking in the context of the transfer portal and NIL, he said, “The reality is the college football that we’ve all known, the college athletics that we’ve all known, that’s not coming back.”
And then there is Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano, who decided this week, with a few others, to bring a controversial chunk of the football program’s past back into the present and future by presenting a resolution to name the Beaver Stadium playing surface for longtime head coach Joe Paterno to the rest of the university’s trustees.
Let me get two important disclaimers out of the way here. First, I have no desire to weigh in on whether Paterno deserves such a posthumous honor, on how his legacy or his family have been treated by the university (now on its third president and third athletic director since he died in 2012), and certainly not on how much culpability he should be assigned for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes or how Penn State handled them. The second is that I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that the stadium turf will bear his name in the near future, barring a nine-figure donation being attached to it, of course.
