The main school in western PA is Pitt (Pittsburghers consider Penn State to be central PA or PA-at-large). Pitt football plays Penn State about once a year, and the ludicrous talent differential between the teams usually means the game gets decided somewhere in the first quarter. But Joe Paterno was a special kind of asshole, so he always kept his top squad in the game to run up the score for no other reason than because he could. Most people in the Pittsburgh area fucking hate(d) Joe Paterno since long before his assistant coach started touching boys. My grandfather was one of the nicest people I ever met, except on the topic of Paterno*. A Penn State bumper sticker parked at Pitt was maybe not a great idea. Trump was basically standing on Pitt campus when he fist-bumped a dead rape enabling shithead whose name is a special kind of dirt in this part of PA**.
Good job all around!
(*) Typical joke, now a bit dated: A football fan dies, goes to heaven and makes a beeline for the nearest game. When he gets there he sees a manic wild-haired coach running up and down the sidelines, abusing players and harassing the refs. “Hey,” the fan says to an angel in the next seat, “I didn’t know Paterno was dead.” “Paterno is fine,” the angel says. “That’s god. He just thinks he’s Joe Paterno.”
(**) Knowing the kind of jagoff who likes Trump, I bet there were plenty of Penn State diehards in that room.
***Update***
Thanks to valued commenter tinare for pointing out that Pitt and Penn State don’t play much football any more. Considering that I know almost nothing about college ball, it should give you some sense how deep the not-love for Paterno runs in these parts.
J
Thanks for confirming what I thought I knew as a former resident and member of the Pitt faculty.
Iowa Old Lady
Unless he meant the answer to be “Still dead,” I thought that was very strange.
dedc79
I feel like there are some very telling parallels between your post and Tom’s post below, and how they reflect on the GOP field.
Gin & Tonic
No pic of Max to lighten the mood? I haz a sad.
First_timer
What a jagoff indeed.
John Cole
T-shirt at WVU in the early 1990’s:
Front- Penn State Sucks.
Back- Pitt Swallows.
tinare
Just as a point of clarification, Pitt and Penn State haven’t played each other since 2000. And there were a few years in the 90s where they hadn’t either. (But they are scheduled to again 2016-2019.) And that was also a major bone of contention for Pitt fans. They blamed Joe Paterno for that ending as well. But, yes, bottom line, Pittsburgh is not Nittany Lion Country. There are a lot of us Penn State grads here (yep I’m one.) But we do know our place most of the time. And, at the time of the scandal this was CERTAINLY one part of the Commonwealth that was not defending JoePa. So, it was a very odd reference on all counts. Basically Trump thinks PA is all the same, and it really is quite different from one side to the other. And his lack of homework on that point showed.
tinare
@John Cole: I attended a basketball game at Pitt in the 90s and I have no memory of exactly who they were playing but it was not PSU. But in the middle of the fight song the student section all shouted “Penn State Sucks.”
Trollhattan
It was many, many years before I learned it wasn’t “Nifty Lions.” Gosh, they sound really swell!
So many things mislearned through the teevee’s mighty 4-inch speaker.
Cacti
And when it comes to Joe’s enabling of Sandusky’s predation, the Ped State faithful have a bigger case of denial than Lost Causers do about the Confederacy.
Tim F.
@tinare: Yeah, that is basically just part of the fight song.
NotMax
“And how about those Quakers? They’ll damn well fight under a Trump administration. Or get sent back to Quakistan!”
tinare
@Tim F.: I didn’t know if they still did that. I haven’t attended any sporting events there in a long time.
Tim F.
@tinare: My information is also pretty dated, but I doubt they stopped.
Trollhattan
@Cacti:
Dwelling on the left coast one generally knows little of ed-you-kay-shunal institutions three time zones distant (aside from ivies) so the Sandusky crimes comprise the majority of what a lot of folks here know about Penn State. I don’t see how they could have handled it worse.
I award them two Kaehis and a double-dose of pepper spray.
Miss Bianca
@NotMax: OK, you just made me do a spit-take…
A Ghost To Most
A popular t-shirt I often saw in Central PA back in the day: Shitt on Pitt.
Tony J
A tad OT but if anyone’s wondering where Amir Khalid is right now he’s probably standing naked on his balcony howling “Dejan! You beauty!!” into the balmy Malaysian night. Liverpool just pulled off the second greatest comeback in our European footballing history, you see, and it was a hell of a rollercoaster getting there.
2-0 down at half time. Pulled one back. Conceded another. Needed three goals to beat the away-goals rule, and we got them, against a very, very good Dortmund side.
Football. Bloody hell.
Adam L Silverman
@Iowa Old Lady: I think he meant getting the statues and other tributes back up on the campus in State College.
dedc79
@Tony J: This Spurs fan is impressed. I had checked the score throughout, saw that it was 2-0 after 9 minutes, and 3-1 well into the second half and figured game over. Clearly I was wrong.
geg6
@tinare:
This. I’m a Pitt grad and I work at a local Penn State campus in the Pittsburgh region. I’m in my 18th year at PSU and there has never been a moment of my life that I didn’t hate Joe Paterno with the heat of a thousand suns, that arrogant fucking asshole. And that’s not even taking into account his enabling of child rape. That neither Trump nor his advance staff could take a few minutes to research this just shows how incompetent they are.
geg6
@tinare:
That’s as much the school cheer as “Pitt is it!”
geg6
@Adam L Silverman:
I don’t. He was clueless. And it doesn’t really matter. People in Pittsburgh generally hate PSU and particularly Joe Paterno.
Randy P
I know that as a music joke. I’ll tell it with the name I heard for it.
Famous violinist gets to heaven. Is greeted by one of his old orchestra buddies, who says “Congratulations, you got named to God’s orchestra! That’s a great honor!”
“God has an orchestra? What’s He like as a conductor?”
“Oh, He’s pretty good. But sometimes He gets a little full of himself and thinks he’s Von Karajan.”
(Insert your favorite outsize ego. There’s certainly a Trump joke in there somewhere)
Tony J
@dedc79:
Yeah, when their third goal went in I thought it was well and truly too high a mountain to climb, but happily I was wrong as could be.
Come on the semi-finals, no one left in the competition is going to want to play us now.
dedc79
@Tony J: Just imagine if they’d gotten their act together earlier in the Premier League season. With Chelsea, Man U and Man City all having uncharacteristically poor seasons, if Liverpool had been this good from the start they’d up there at the top with LC and Tottenham.
nanhaugh
@Cacti: “Ped State”. Good one.
Tony J
@dedc79:
Story of modern Liverpool. When we play the ‘top’ teams we’re a class outfit, then drop points to teams in the bottom half. Hopefully Klopp can continue his building work and get that kind of performance out of the team when we’re playing Crystal Palace, Sunderland, Aston Villa, etc. Do that and we’ll have the kind of consistency that your Spurs have shown to get within touching distance of the title. After all, if it hadn’t been for the unholy pact Claudio Ranieri made with Moloch the Child-Eater last March to have his players replaced by hex-casting demons you’d have one hand on the Premier League trophy by now.
Gin & Tonic
@Randy P: I heard a very, very long jazz version ending in God standing and holding his horn with his back to the audience – “Oh, that’s God, he thinks he’s Miles Davis.”
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
There is an institution of higher learning in North Carolina, Guilford College, which was founded by the Society of Friends. Their team is called “The Fighting Quakers.”
Makes me laugh every time I see it.
Tinare
@geg6: Yeah, I didn’t know if things had maybe cooled a little since the rivalry games are so far back and whether the kids today would still be shouting that. (God I feel old saying that…) I thought it was funny, so I’m glad if they still do it. Rivalries in sports are fun. I grew up in Pittsburgh so I had lots of friends who went to Pitt who gave me lots of crap about going to Penn State and vice versa. And then we gave our friends who went to WVU even more crap. Good times.
dedc79
@Tony J: I’m mostly just happy that Spurs are in the mix for a Champions League spot, but it is a bit of a bummer to be this close and then lose out to Leicester freaking City. I’m still hoping they’ll collapse, but they have to give up an occasional goal to collapse.
Bobby Thomson
@SiubhanDuinne: I see you aren’t familiar with the historical Fighting Quakers, who took up arms with the rebels in the American Revolution. That was really a thing.
bk
@Tim F.: When I went to Chapel Hill far too many years ago, the last four words of our fight song were “Go to hell, Duke”.
Tony J
@dedc79:
Leicester this season…. there are no words. A team that were relegation fodder last season have come out and played every single game like it’s a cup final. They hands down deserve to be Champions, and if that yanks the balls of our more ‘aristocratic’ teams with our legacies of entitlement, good on them. Like you say, it’s fricking Leicester City out there winning game after game after game, no one gave them a chance and they’ve done what I dearly wish we’d have done a couple of seasons ago.
Hopefully see you in next year’s Champion’s League.
geg6
@Tinare:
If there’s one thing that Pitt and Penn State fans are in total agreement on, it’s that WVU sucks. And Ohio State and Duke, too. Everybody hates them.
ETA: And we can’t leave out Notre Dame and Miami!
tinare
@geg6: And Temple and Syracuse… It’s really a long list…
RSR
“jagoff” Yinzers love that word, at least according to John Fetterman.
PA-Sen: Fetterman Calls Trump A “Jagoff”
biffdiggerence
That same bad joke was used long ago. With Jimmy Hoffa substituted for Joe Paterno.
Stan
@RSR: Yes, “jagoff” or just “jag” is a really common insult in Pittsburgh. It’s stronger than “jerk” but maybe not quite as bad as “asshole”.
I’ve got a nice black-and-yellow sticker on my fridge that says “God hates jags” ;)