FAIL

I have a Salon article that will be up shortly [link] on Joe Posnanski’s biography of Joe Paterno, in which I didn’t touch on any matters other than Posnanski’s handling of the Sandusky scandal (this on the theory that under current circumstances the rest of the book is an other than that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? exercise).

But I do want to mention here what would be a big flaw if the book wasn’t already a total disaster because of the way it deals with the scandal, which is that Posnanski doesn’t actually know very much about college football. This comes out in a hundred little details, a couple of which Allen Barra mentioned yesterday. Here’s another, which in itself is no big deal but which indicates that the guy doesn’t really know the subject matter in the way you would want somebody writing the semi-official biography of Paterno to know it: In discussing the 1999 Michigan-PSU game, Posnanski refers to “Michigan’s young quarterback Tom Brady.” Young of course is a relative term — all college football players are young, so referring to a college player as young means he’s a freshman or maybe a sophomore. Brady was a fifth-year senior at the time.

There are a bunch of things in the book like this, which on an individual level are just pedantic quibbles, but which collectively are symptomatic of somebody who’s not really in control of a lot of the basics of his subject matter. This in turn is important because it allows Posnanski to uncritically swallow a bunch of nonsense about The Grand Experiment and the supposed uniqueness of PSU, which itself plays a role in leading him to draw truly preposterous judgments about Paterno’s behavior in the Sandusky matter.