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Penn State Has Removed The Joe Paterno Statue
It was inevitable and shortly after 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning Penn State began blocking off access to the statue of the disgraced former coach in front of Beaver Stadium. The statue will be placed in storage. President Rodney Erickson announced the decision Sunday morning, saying it was a divisive sy...

Playing Basketball For Team USA Sure Seems Like Fun
From USA Today Sports, which has its own Pinterest board(!), comes this sunny photo gallery of Team USA basketball players practicing in Spain. We'll never know if this iteration of the Olympic team could have beaten the '92 Dream Team, but I think it's safe to say that the 2012 team has the edge i...

Franco Harris On Joe Paterno: Yep, I'm Still Hopelessly Deluded
Franco Harris read "most of" the Freeh Report (the stuff about the massive, program and university-wide cover up must have been in the last chapter) and has come to this conclusion: "there was no cover up." Even, for the sake of argument, assuming the existence of a cover up, Harris "feel[s] even m...

Decision On The Paterno Statue Coming Soon
According to Don Van Natta, Jr., Penn State president Rodney Erickson is expected to make a decision on the removal of the Paterno statue within 72 hours. Kim Jones's initial report is looking more and more accurate. The point of contention trustees had was with Bonnie Bernstein's report that a vot...

Every Winner Of The Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, In Descending Order Of How Much They Look Like Ernest Hemingway
Every year, on the third Saturday in July, Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West hosts the Hemingway Look-Alike Society's Hemingway Look-Alike Contest. The 2012 champion will be named tomorrow. We went through 31 years of winners, and ranked them all on how much they look like Ernest Hemingway, starting with...

Shaq Thompson Update: Shaq Has An At-Bat Where He Doesn't Strike Out!
Red Sox prospect and UW football recruit Shaq Thompson is putting together one of the all-time great stat sheets. Coming into today, Thompson was 0-for-37, with 36 strikeouts in his short career. (He'll start at safety for the Huskies in the fall.) We're committed to providing you the latest Shaq Th...

Buster Posey Got Fat, Tan
(That is not Buster Posey.)...

Former Board President Steve Garban Is First Penn State Trustee To Resign
It's hard to believe that in all the months since the Sandusky scandal broke, and amid all the calls for accountability among Penn State's leadership, that not one member of the university's Board of Trustees had resigned. Now, there comes word from Happy Valley that Steve Garban, who was board pres...

<em>Appetite For Destruction</em> At 25: One Horny Young Boy's Recollection
The first kid in my middle school to discover Appetite for Destruction was a big football player named Si. Everyone in my class was terrified of Si because Si was the only kid in our grade who had gotten pubes. You walked into the shower and in the crowd of hairless penises was this big kid with a m...

So, What Kind of Batman Movie Should They Make Next?
Whatever your thoughts end up being about The Dark Knight Rises—even if you're like me, say, and think it pales it comparison to the previous two films but still sorta blows you away—Christopher Nolan has wrapped up his trilogy in a fashion that clearly won't damage his legacy: This isn't Spider-Man...

Minnesota Governor Says Football Players Get Arrested Because They're Basically Soldiers Returning From War
It's hard to understate how shocking Adrian Peterson's arrest is in Minnesota. It's just a misdemeanor, for a weird sole charge of resisting arrest, and the details of the incident sound less than damning, but this is AP. All Day. Purple Jesus. Peterson has never had even a whiff of trouble, and by ...

Matt Barkley Says He Would Have Been Drafted Before Robert Griffin III
Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: Barkley says he goes second, after Luck—but before RG3....

Shaq Thompson Update: Strikes Out Five Times, Is Now 0-For-37 With 36 Ks
We told you yesterday about Shaq Thompson, the UW football recruit who is giving baseball a go in the Red Sox system. His career stats, since being drafted by Boston in the 18th round, are incredible: Not a single hit, and all but one of his outs have been strikeouts. (To be totally fair, he has sev...

Sure, God Made The Universe. But Can He Coach An American Marathoner To Olympic Gold?
March 29 was a busy day for Ryan Hall, the fastest American marathoner ever. He was 137 days and roughly 2,100 miles of road training away from representing the country in the London Olympics. He had to be up early for drug testing....

Bruce Wanes. <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>, Reviewed.
1. The first two Batman films from director Christopher Nolan were so transcendent, so ambitious and challenging and grand, that The Dark Knight Rises feels like more of a disappointment than it should. The first two movies, especially The Dark Knight, were miracles, an impossible combination of uni...

Jerry Sandusky Scandal Reminds Columnist Of That Time He And The Rest Of His Nebraska Town "Sorta Did A JoePa," Too
This handsome stalk of corn is a guy named Les Mann, longtime columnist for the Daily News in Norfolk, a town of 24,000 in northeast Nebraska. He's been following this Penn State scandal pretty closely, and now he has something to get off his chest. His story begins with a phone call from some "twer...

In Desperate Bid To Be Down With The Youngs, <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Uses Instagram Photos In This Week's Issue
Oh boy. We've seen this before. Magazines are a bit of a crossroads, so in order to either (a) appeal to a younger audience or (b) to try to "engage social media," or whatever jargon-laden or ham-fisted way they want to describe it, they do little experiments....

Jeremy Lin Is Now A Houston Rocket
Twelve days ago, I wrote the following:...

Report: Penn State President Passed On Sweeping Reforms In 2004
The entire Penn State/Jerry Sandusky scandal is sickening in every way, but any time phrases like "could have prevented" get thrown around makes the whole thing especially horrifying, and ESPN's Don Van Natta Jr. has uncovered one of those very stories, dropping a bombshell tonight that in 2004, the...

Whoa, We're Halfway There: The Grierson & Leitch Top 12 Movies Of The First Half of 2012
Shockingly, we are more than halfway through 2012. (It's a backloaded year: Olympics, election, total global catastrophe—all stacked up from late July on.) As always, the best, most "prestigious" movies won't be released until November or December, because the people who vote on the Oscars are senil...