Lou Holtz Gives Penn State A Pep Talk. Seriously.

Unfortunately, Lou’s 0-3 on the season so far with these pep talks. Also, noting the comments, THANK GOD someone reposted the video of former Wilson High School Jim Cantafio. It’s what Lou Holtz would have done thirty years ago, perhaps after a cocaine binge and a biker brawl. Let’s face it, Lou never was the most excitable guy compared to most college coaches.

Anyway, the video is a perfect end to Michigan week since Cantafio was Chad Henne’s coach, and Henne’s spurning of Penn State led to a cataclysmic rift between Cantafio and Joe Paterno:

But when Henne signed with Michigan, Joe Paterno publicly criticized Cantafio, who had made himself the mandatory go-between for college coaches to contact Henne, and limited the youngster’s availability even during NCAA open contact periods.

“They don’t talk to me anymore,” Cantafio said. “Coach Paterno, other Penn State coaches, they’ve been in my house for dinner several times. Now they won’t talk to me anymore. It bothered me for a while, but I don’t really think about it anymore, how close I was to those guys, for so many years, and now those guys hold it against me just because Chad chose to go to Michigan.”

COACH SMASH!!11!!one!!!1!

 

What ever happened to that guy, anyway?

After the video gained notoriety from Deadspin and EDSBS, it was quickly taken down. I don’t know why, I can only assume it was at the request of the coach or the school district. If so, total pussy move. Unfettered insanity shouldn’t be kept from the public at large. It needs to be celebrated. And mocked. Mostly mocked. If someone can download this from YouTube and send it to me (runupthescore at gmail), I would be eternally grateful. I know there are ways. Give a helpless Mac user a hand, won’t you? I’m not sure I can live in a world where a copy of that video isn’t stored somewhere, so download it before it’s taken down again. You know, unless you don’t have any pride, Danny.

On an unrelated note, allow me to sing the praises of PennLive.com’s Penn State section. Some newspapers are much slower to adapt to new technology and media than others, and I’ve been pleasantly amazed by PennLive’s sports coverage. They’ve found a nice mix of traditional, regular columns and irregular bloggish articles, not to mention the rather nice addition of the weekly video blogs from the office and the Penn State press box. They even have a full-time PSU football blogger (sadly, unable to make liberal use of f-bombs, which I believe is a requirement of all pajama-clad, basement bound, juice box slurping bloggers) and are gracious enough to link to The Nittany Line, Black Shoe Diaries, and Run Up The Score, which I know we all appreciate very much considering that none of us, to my knowledge, even asked for the links. That last part alone is worth mountains of goodwill to me.

That said, I don’t understand why they’re trying to scare the living crap out of motorists. This new, high intensity video billboard is located just west of Harrisburg.

Wait, which one is Write No Evil?

It’s easy to poke fun, but think about how horrified you would be if your employer said that your picture would be hovering above a busy highway in eight-million watts of glory. Not a pleasant scenario, particular for those of us who are already self-conscious that our heads are way too big — and I don’t mean egotistically, we’re talking circumference here. However, as someone over at FightOnState said, the hair helmet / mullet combination is perplexing. Looks like it needs a chinstrap. And yes, I’m just jealous because I’m probably 20 years younger than Nick Horvath and it would take approximately that long for me to grow a similar head of hair.

As penance, here’s a childhood exchange between my father and me.

(Late night edit:  I’ve added Absolute Pigskin to the PSU Blogs section to the right, even though it’s not entirely a PSU site.  It’s more like 60%, but they take a crack at some heavy analysis, so that’s good enough for me.)