FOOTBALL STORY WINS AGAIN

The Penn State athletics department has announced that The Penn State Football Story has won another regional emmy, and might this blog say that it is well-deserved. It is the sixth such honor awarded to the program in the last eleven years which is produced by Mind over Media in conjunction with Penn State University Intercollegiate Athletics. To appreciate the quality and professionalism of the program one need only watch some other schools' highlight shows and realize how nothing stacks up to the Football Story.



So often, other school's shows have a very amateurish quality about them, looking more like a high school news broadcast than a marketing and highlight show for a multi-million dollar football program. Usually consisting of the head coach and a host sitting in director chairs in front of a blown up, pixelated panorama landscape of the football stadium, these shows are little more than polite conversation and some film breakdown from the last week's game.

I've always had a theory as to why the Football Story was so much better than the rest. It seems that Joe Paterno might not be open to doing a half-hour sitdown television show each week, considering he doesn't appear to be too thrilled to do the weekly press conferences, the quarterback club luncheon and the Thursday night radio call-in show. Since the producers of the show can't rely on just having the head coach talk about the game, they are forced to fill the half-hour production with insightful profiles of players, much more behind-the-scenes footage and visually striking presentations of highlights. Whether this is the reason or not, The Penn State Football Story has certainly earned all the critical acclaim it has garnered and has become almost as much required viewing as the games themselves.