Remember about a week ago, when the news surfaced that Pitt and Penn State, might renew the rivalry. Guess who is doing his best to kill that:
Q: Is there an interest in renewing rivalry with Pitt?
PATERNO:There are a lot of reasons for not playing it. One of which is that Pitt decided to go their way. All of those years when they weren’t in the Big East, we couldn’t get them to play us in basketball. It’s a two-way street. I tried to get them all into a league and if Pitt had been willing to go along with the league, we would have had a Big East arrangement that probably would have been better for a lot of different people. That and the fact that when we go to play Pitt at Pitt, they double the price for our fans. It’s not the same price (as other games). At one time you had to buy two tickets in order to get to see Penn State play Pitt out there. We would love to play Pitt if they would come here 2-1 and not because we particularly want that, but we think that would be a fair way for us to give them the same kind of money. It’s not really a good arrangement for us. Now having said that, which I know that next part of this is not going to get printed, I’d love to play Pitt. I grew up here when Pitt and Penn State were big rivalries. I’d love to play Pitt. I have all kinds of friends at Pitt. Suzy Broadhurst, whose husband, Jim, has been marvelous in fundraising at Penn State, some of the trustees in Pittsburgh?we have more alumni in Allegheny County than Pitt has in Allegheny County. I think it’s natural. We should play it. But there has got to be an arrangement. We have to have six home games. We have a women’s basketball team in Italy, we have a men’s soccer team in Brazil, and that is great. We have 29 sports and we have two-thirds of the budget that Texas has and Texas has 19 sports. And that all has to come out of the revenue that we can produce out of football because the University doesn’t give us a nickel. Anything that we do has to be based on “can we have six home game? Can we satisfy the fact that we have become a national school that we have tremendous pressure to play in different parts of the country?” We are playing Boston College. Syracuse is getting back on the schedule. Notre Dame is getting back on the schedule. You would think Pitt would be a natural, West Virginia would be a natural to get back on the schedule. But there are a lot of things involved in it. It’s not just a question of picking up the phone and saying “let’s play.” I think some people have to make some concessions to us because of the problems that certain games would create for us. It has nothing to do with competition, it’s got to do with how you finance the operation you have.
I don’t even feel like tackling the number of lies, half-truths, spin and plain bull s**t in there. Suffice to say that he took more time rationalizing this than any other question in the press conference.
