The Tolley column is satire. The dude is trying to be funny. Which brings me to the matter at hand, which, by the way, is NOT me trying to be funny (which, by the way, some people have said I sometimes am, though my wife voices the term "weird"). Okay, now that we've established what my intent is not, let us proceed directly to the matter at hand: Did you know that once upon a football season, The Pennsylvania State University sashayed onto the field wearing costumes (I hesitate to refer to them as "uniforms") that were ... pink and black?!
Don't know about you, but that strikes me a bit, well, to use my wife's word, "weird" (I deliberated using my own word "fay," but it hasn't been turned into an adjective yet).
At any rate, as history goes in the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it was the fall of 1887, and it was the first time tPSU was fielding a football team. Black (as compared to the faded black PSU currently throws on its backs) was one of the team's colors, along with pink.
Pink? I’m getting a pretty good mental image of the cheerleaders. Poodle skirts (even though poodle skirts hadn’t been created when the football team was prancing around in pink and black "uniforms"). Maybe some cheerleader association-approved pink panties underneath. But the football team?! I can’t get Disney’s
Fantasia out of my mind. The hippos in pink tutus. The elephants in pink ballet slippers.
Oh, gads, enough of this nonsense. Next thing you know, there'll have their squirt guns aimed at me!
Seriously, though (which, by the way, brings up a real problem with sports these days: the games have ceased to be "games" and the whole thing is being taken way too seriously) ...
- We are the underdogs in this cat fight
- The cat house hosting the skirmish doesn't take kindly to outsiders even if they pay
- tPSU "Nits" are a prideful pride with a ferocious way (seriously) and we really need to hope the guy taking snaps for us vs. NMSU in our home opener has a "4" on his back
- Despite the evacuations, the level of talent remaining at tPSU remains high, particularly on defense
- OUr special teams are raw meat that could prove to be a feast for the Nits
- The mantra for Penn State is "Every Saturday's Our Bowl Game," which means this and the next 11 weeks will be what the Nits are playing for to give some meaning and reason to all the craziness that has come down
Speaking to that last point: My hope is that the guys in Green and White and those in Navy and White show a lot more class than do a lot of us gas bags who blow acrid smoke through our finger tips.