The Penn State Football Show

Lots of good points in there Drew. In fact, I was pretty much going to say the same exact thing about LJ Sr. Losing him would be really tough. As you pointed out, he is a great recruiter, but he is also a tremendous d-line coach.

Look at our d-lines the last 5 years. Nobody in the Big Ten has been able to run on Penn State, even when Penn State was struggling. Lawrence Maroney, nation's leading rusher at the time, comes to Happy Valley: 22 carries for 48 yards. Same for Chris Wells and Javon Ringer this year. Look at the guys he has sent to the NFL: Jay Alford, Tamba Hali, Jimmy Kennedy, Anthony Adams, Michael Haynes. The list goes on.

He would be sorely missed, and I agree with your exact plan: Name Bradley the head coach-in-waiting and LJ Sr. the next defensive coordinator. This would certainly get him to stay. The problem then is Vanderlinden might bounce, but I think it is inevitable that either he or Johnson, whoever is not the next d-coordinator, will look to go elsewhere. If it were up to me, I would choose Johnson over Vanderlinden.

Joe loves the university and has done so many wonderful things for Penn State. It would be in the best interest of the university to name the successor right now before things start to fall apart. I have said before how excited I am about the defense next year. But, if LJ Sr. goes, and Maybin leaves early, and so does Evans, things could be not nearly as promising as they were two weeks ago. Keep in mind, if LJ Sr. does decide to leave, it would obviously have a huge impact on the decisions of Maybin, Evans, and Odrick. They do have to decide by Thursday though. Right now it's looking like Maybin is gone - but he hasn't officially said that yet. Odrick looks like he's coming back, and I have no clue what to expect with Evans. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

In regards to Obama, I'm siding with him on this one. I've seen him say a few times that he has more important things to deal with and can't really waste his time on the BCS. So it's not like he's going around parading for a playoff and spending hours formulating a system. I think it's more that he had that one interview where he mentioned it as the number one issue to change in sports, and now reporters continually bring it up to him because it's something that many Americans are interested in. At first I too thought it was kind of silly for the President to even be discussing the issue, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. While sports might seem like a trivial matter, when you look at it from the business perspective and how college football is letting financial interests completely control the way the entire business is run, it becomes a more pressing issue. Also, I've heard a number of cases of attorneys looking into the BCS being a violation of various anti-trust laws and things of that sort. We will see what comes out of it, but I don't have much problem with the President merely acknowledging that is an issue.

And believe it or not, I actually did not tune in to the Va Tech-Cincy game. I enjoyed that shot at me though. Haha.