The piece from Chuck Finder that pissed me off over the weekend, but maybe I need to reconsider. Well, probably not. His eagerness to have Pitt take a 2-1 deal ruins the whole thing. Add in the fact that it was just the topper of a week plus of stories calling for the resumption of the Pitt-Penn St. Game, and I had just about had it.

Then Bruce Feldman puts it on his blog on ESPN.com (Insider subscription). He cherry-picks just the part about how Gov. Rendell should get involved, so it is easier for him. Feldman, adds his own very salient point:

…I think one of the things that makes college football the best game going are the rivalries, and nothing is better than seeing them settled out on the field. Come on Penn State, step up to the plate.

And there it is. The one thing that keeps this issue alive. That keeps, even me, coming back to the damn thing.

Rivalries. Pitt, the fans and alum are lucky. We still have WVU to get revved to face and vice versa. During basketball season, we get fired up to play UConn and Syracuse. The games matter. We have certain games we circle and know that even if the season sucks — if we win those games, it isn’t all bad. Penn State may still be the primary to most of us, but we still have someone else to be a real rival game.

Who does Penn State have? Who in the Big 11 is their rival? Or should we just say is even a burgeoning rival? Or even out of the conference who do they play that matters? They have the jury-rigged Land Grant Trophy battle with Michigan State that no one buys into. They want to claim some sort of rivalry with Ohio State, but who are they kidding? No one from the other side really cares when there is that school to the North to obsess over the course of the season. Trust me, I live in Ohio, no one from TOSU is losing their mind over Penn State week. (I mean aside from some guy in Altoona.)

Without a real rivalry game in any team sport, the team lacks soul, drive and fire. For Penn St. fans it has become cold calculations of numbers and money. How many games can they win to get to a bowl? To get respect? Well, did the football team still pack ’em in? Sell merchandise? Or even more pathetic, to denigrate other rivalry games to cover the lack of their own.