Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, No. 11 Penn State. 

Today was a wild fourth day of preliminary hearings in the case of 18 Penn State fraternity brothers charged in the February hazing death of Tim Piazza. Lawyers for members of Beta Theta Pi are attempting to get the case thrown out before it reaches trial, and a Penn State football staffer’s role in the night’s events…

Penn State chose not to stand by whistleblower Mike McQueary when he brought forward allegations of child sex abuse and later served as a witness in the case against Jerry Sandusky and the university. Now, the school is paying the price.

College football fans know that when a player gets in trouble, it won’t be too long before that player retains legal counsel—and usually very good counsel. At Florida, it’s Huntley Johnson. At Florida State, it’s Tim Jansen. At Tennessee, players got a list of six defense lawyers with ties to the athletic department.…

The cache of court documents related to the Penn State abuse scandal that were unsealed today came from the university’s legal dispute with its insurance company, PMA, which argued that it was not responsible for covering the university’s payments to Jerry Sandusky’s victims, in part because Penn State officials…

Among the documents relating to the Penn State abuse scandal that were unsealed by a Pennsylvania court today is a deposition given by former Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary, the key witness who claims he saw Jerry Sandusky molesting a boy in the football team’s shower in 2001, and then reported the…

The Penn State defense is so well-practiced, so perfected, that by now you can practically write it yourself. The accusations are unsubstantiated; too much time has passed; nobody remembers; there are no records. The language changes from email to email and statement to statement as the university blasts them out to…

I’m all for football teams carrying out batshit rituals that are meant to exorcise bad vibes, but I feel like going to the Let’s Meaningfully Bury Some Shit well just one week into the season is a little much. Penn State would disagree:

Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. We start with No. 25…

This here is Quinn Nordin, and today he committed to Penn State. Below, you’ll find a video he and a friend put together announcing his commitment, set to “Coming Home.” It makes no real sense in the first place—he’s from Michigan—and involving some sort of small, fixed-wing aircraft makes it even more of a non…

Last night, Keith Olbermann got into it on Twitter with Penn State fans and students—originally over, of all things, the school's annual pediatric cancer fundraiser. (His tweets are embedded below.) It was weird and unnecessary, and now ESPN has taken Olbermann off TV for the rest of the week.

There were no truthers back in the 20^th century. I grew up in the Golden Age of Kennedy Assassination Conspiracies, but the word "truther" was never used to describe Oliver Stone or any of the other folks who decried the Magic Bullet theory. (DISCLOSURE: I saw JFK when I was in high school and took every scene as…