Posts tagged ‘ESPN’
Ed DeChellis Live Chat on ESPN. Any Questions?
Hoops season has been over for a couple of months now, but Ed DeChellis ’82 Edu is staying busy. Over the weekend, the Nittany Lion basketball coach hosted the annual Coaches v. Cancer Golf Tournament; today, he’s at the ESPN studios in Connecticut, where he’ll take questions in a live Web chat starting at 2:30 pm. If you’d like to query the coach (or just say hello), check out the link, log in, and fire away.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
From “Faculty Kid” to College Football Expert
I’ll state my bias straight up: College GameDay, ESPN’s college football studio show, is one of my favorite TV shows of any genre. I love it because Chris Fowler, Lee Corso, and Kirk Herbstreit are experts who don’t take themselves too seriously. (Also, because mascots are very cool.) They have fun, and isn’t that what sports are supposed to be?
Fowler brought that vibe to campus last Friday afternoon when he spoke to a group of journalism students and college football fans. Malcolm Moran, director of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism (additional disclosure: I am a board member), gave Fowler a big buildup, calling him the “ringleader” of GameDay. Fowler interjected, dryly, “Babysitter.”
Partly, Fowler came to campus to give students an inside look at the TV journalism business and his road to success. He did that humorously and earnestly—to the point that he once laughed and apologized for sounding like Tony Robbins.
“You have to have that genuine passion,” Fowler said. “Never have to fake it, and you’ll be ahead of the game.”
But he also has a Penn State connection. His father, Knox Fowler, was a theatre professor at the University in the mid-’70s, and during his junior-high years, Chris lived in State College—in the same neighborhood as our class notes editor, Julie Nelson ’86, who can attest to Fowler’s early love of pick-up football.
Fowler, a Midwest boy and die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan, learned to love college football then, too. “Faculty kids” could go to a game for $1. The kids used to pass tickets through a chain-link fence at the south end of Beaver Stadium, which was more primitive back then. So, Fowler noted, “you could get four kids in for a buck if you were pretty sly.” (Julie, daughter of a Penn State accounting professor, confirmed this.)
Other notes from Fowler’s talk:
—He was so animated and candid discussing why he thinks college football should scrap the BCS and institute an eight-team playoff that his wife, sitting in the audience, cringed.
—On college football: “There’s something unique about the passion and the way a campus builds up the week before a game.”
—On Penn State’s game-day atmosphere: “When you guys behave yourself, the Whiteout is the most tremendous display of school spirit with students supporting their team in all of college football.”
—On GameDay: “The show is almost always careening out of control.”
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Prime-Time Revenge
The early pick for best atmosphere of the 2009 Penn State football season? Easy: The Sept. 26 home date with Iowa, which has just been announced as an 8 p.m. kickoff on either ABC or ESPN. Expect an overflow (and very noisy) crowd for what is sure to be the season’s first (and perhaps only) all-stadium “White Out.”
And don’t expect anyone in the crowd to have forgotten this.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Up Against the NIT
The Schreyer Honors College’s annual Mark Luchinsky Memorial Lecture had the misfortune of being scheduled for 7 p.m. last night—exactly the same time that the Nittany Lions tipped off against Baylor in the NIT championship game at Madison Square Garden. Still, there was a great turnout for the lecture, which featured Penn State vascular surgeon David Han ’88, ’95g talking about the state of health care today.
David, himself a former honors student at Penn State, is the current president of the Penn State Alumni Association. His talk—held at the State Theatre downtown—covered a lot of ground, from the high cost of attending medical school (the average student leaves medical school with more than $140,000 in debt), to the fancy technologies that make surgery today easier and safer, to the likelihood of a substantial physician shortage by the year 2025. The first image, above, shows what medical students today expect their profession will be like in the future. (Click on it to see a bigger version.)
David also lamented that physicians have so little time for one-on-one interactions with patients, and offered some advice on how patients can get the best out of that limited time, as you can see in the second image.
He talked a bit about Mark Luchinsky, the person for whom the annual lecture is named; Luchinsky was a Penn State honors student who died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 20, back in January 1995. David even showed slides explaining what a pulmonary embolus is, and a video showing a high-tech way of treating it—where surgeons send a tiny filter up through a vein to trap the embolism.
After the talk, the folks at the State Theatre replaced David’s PowerPoint slides with the telecast of the NIT game—and we all know how that turned out. Senior editor Ryan Jones drove to New York City yesterday for the game, and I’m sure he’ll have lots to tell when he gets back.
Tina Hay, editor
At Home in The Garden
The semifinals and final of the National Invitational Tournament, college basketball’s oldest postseason tourney, have always been played at Madison Square Garden. Folks watching Tuesday night’s NIT semifinals can be forgiven, though, if they thought Penn State was playing a home game.
Talor Battle has the Nittany Lions one win from the NIT championship.
The terrific turnout of Nittany Lion fans at the Garden last night played a huge role in Penn State’s 67-59 victory over Notre Dame. Some 16 buses left State College Tuesday morning, carrying students who paid $20 each for roundtrip bus fare and a game ticket. Among those in attendance (though I’m guessing they didn’t take the bus) were Lady Lion basketball coach Coquese Washington, women’s volleyball coach Russ Rose, and athletic director Tim Curley ’76, ’78g — all of whom got plenty of ESPN airtime because they were sitting next to Joe Paterno.
JoePa’s presence was a big deal for the broadcast folks, who pulled Joe down for a lengthy courtside interview during the first half. If you missed it, keep an eye out for it on YouTube — it’s classic, unfiltered Paterno. But the ESPN crew also couldn’t say enough about the Penn State fan turnout, showing video of the bus armada leaving State College (sadly also unavailable online, although local station WTAJ did a cool feature that you can see here) and constantly mentioning the support of the students and alumni in attendance — you can read more about the home-game atmosphere in a column by Collegian beat writer Matt Brown.
Word is those $20 bus-and-game tickets will be available again Thursday, when the Nittany Lions hope for a similar turnout — and a similar result — when they face Baylor in the NIT title game. Tip-off is at 7 p.m. on ESPN.
Quick Wednesday afternoon update: I failed to mention that one of the buses that made the Happy Valley-to-Big Apple trek on Tuesday was sponsored by the Alumni Association. My colleague Casey Keiber ’00, ’07g tells me the Association is sponsoring another bus for Thursday’s return trip, to go along with the 18 student buses (!) set to make the trip. Can’t wait to be in the Garden on Thursday night.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Joe’s Staying, and Kevin’s On His Way
Some news you’ve probably heard by now: Joe Paterno has agreed to a three-year contact extension to coach the Penn State football team. (Here’s an entertaining take from Phil Sheridan of the Philly Inquirer, and here’s some breathless analysis from some guy on ESPN.)
Some news you might not have heard: Within a couple hours of the announcement of Paterno’s new deal, highly rated prep quarterback Kevin Newsome of Virginia committed to play for Penn State. (You can find some grainy but impressive high school highlights of Newsome here.) Newsome (pictured) had originally committed to Michigan before changing his mind — a common occurrence in the recruiting game these days — and his commitment makes Pat Devlin’s transfer last week much easier for Nittany Lion fans to take.
In college football, as in life, there are no guarantees: The wording of the University’s press release seems to give both parties some wiggle room, and there have been plenty of “highly rated” recruits who never pan out. Future uncertainties aside, Tuesday afternoon was a good day to be a Penn State football fan.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
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