With the Armed Forces Bowl still nearly two weeks away, San Diego State football got some national publicity today on a couple of fronts. Half of it was even good!
We start with Rashaad Penny. Fresh off a fifth-place finish in the Heisman Trophy voting, the nation’s top yardage-accumulator actually received a non-snub* from the Associated Press.
The only other Aztecs ever to receive first-team AP recognition were Marshall Faulk and Canadian Prime Minister Noel Prefontaine. It’s a pretty amazing honor that the SDSU staff will bring up to literally every high school kid they recruit from now until forever.
But is it enough to make us, as Aztecs fans, finally shed the massive Power Five/East Coast Bias persecution complex we carry around with us like a hydroflask? LOL no.
NOT WHILE LEE CORSO WALKS THE EARTH A FREE MAN.
Which brings us to our second story. Today on local talk radio, Rocky Long said a true thing about the obscene amounts of money polluting big-time college football … and the national media decided to drag him for it.
Shot:
Chaser:
There are two things at play here in this controversy.
The first is that I don’t believe the national media is aware that Rocky talks like this all the time. If you ask him a direct question, he will give you his unfiltered opinion. Here, he was not taking some petty jab at Jimbo Fisher, specifically, but decrying the rotten system. He said it because he:
1. Obviously believes it
2. Doesn’t give a shit
I can understand why it’s confusing to those accustomed to platitudes and coachspeak.
What chaps me, though, are the people that want to attack Rocky as some kind of hypocrite because he got a $10,000 bonus for Penny being named an All-American. A bonus which we learned today … might not actually be a real thing?
Let’s assume the bonus is real, though. Obviously, I wish Penny was getting that bonus money and not Rocky. Unfortunately, that’s not possible because the NCAA is a free-labor trashpile.
But it’s not Rocky’s fault that that bonus in his contract, especially considering it is, apparently, not even something he asked for. Just as it’s not Fisher’s fault that his contract will allow him to buy roughly 3 million new Home Depot Christmas trees.
But to draw a false equivalence between a 10k bonus for a coach whose $826,304 base salary ranks sixth among Mountain West coaches, and a dude ditching his unpaid players for a $75 million deal?
To equate Group of Five table scraps with Power Five largess?
You can kindly get the fuck out of here with that nonsense.
*Is there another word for this occurrence? I’m only familiar with snubs.
KABEER THIRTY 