One interesting thing about the Penn State investigation on “Outside the Lines,” was the contrast between what Joe said and what University president Graham Spanier said.
Confronted with the raw numbers - 46 players arrested since 2002, 27 of them found guilty of something - Paterno went into knee-jerk defensive mode, using the word “witchhunt,” several times.
Spanier, confronted with the same numbers, said, “They’re staggering numbers. They’re very high and they shouldn’t be that way. It might often be the case that there is an initial overreaction as evidenced by the dismissal of so many charges. But never mind that; it’s still the case that many of these charges have stuck.”
More surprising, ESPN came up with some evidence the football program had attempted to influence Penn State’s Judicial Affairs Dept. regarding penalties for players. JoePa of course vehemently denied that. Spanier said something to the effect that the football program “was involved in a discussion about what was fair.”
So Chase Utley is hurt. Maybe. That explains some, but not all, of the presumptive MVP’s awful offense of late. For the first five weeks of this season Utley was Rogers Hornsby with better defense. Since then he’s been Duane Kuiper.
He’s constantly behind in the count (how many many of his ABs the last 10 weeks have started with him taking a breaking ball for strike one?), almost never walks, and when he does put it in play uses like one-eighth of the field, usually the second baseman’s neighborhood. Why teams don’t use a full Ted Williams shift on Utley - at least this year much more of a pull hitter than Ryan Howard - is a mystery. You can’t put all of that on a sore hip.
I’m making it sound worse than it is, of course. Utley’s a great player going through a bad stretch.
In a related story, last week Sports Illustrated published a poll of National league players on who’d be the league’s MVP this year. Utley not only won, he got as many votes, 50 percent, as everyone else combined. OK, maybe the poll was done months ago - in which case SI should have said so - but what’s interesting is how bulletproof Utley’s reputation has become. He’s approaching Derek Jeterville.
Yo Packers: A month ago you seemed happy to let Brett Favre retire. Now you won’t take less than first-round pick in trade for him? Dump him for whatever you can get, and for the love of God put this nightmare behind us.
