Sep 16, 2017 5 min read

Serious question: How drunk do you have to be to watch Penn State play Georgia State in football?

That’s what happened Saturday night in Happy Valley and one estimate I saw was that 87,000 were expected to show up.

I get that it’s all about raising money for the athletic department, so that the swimming team can fly to road meets in Nebraska, but games like that only make sense because the fans don’t have enough sense to stay away.

I also get that it’s all about the tailgating and the reuniting with college friends for the weekend, but that doesn’t explain how anyone outside of the players’ immediate families would want to watch the game.

Put on a concert.

How about a Shakespeare festival? Would people tailgate for that? I have a feeling they would if there was no game.

Mercer played at Auburn yesterday.

As much as I appreciate his talent and his contribution to Western culture, I’m not a huge Shakespeare fan, but I’d rather sit in a stadium and watch a really nice production of “Taming of the Shrew” than Mercer trying to play football against Auburn.

Both are farces, by the way.

• Of course, some medication might have been required to keep Pitt fans in their seats for the 59-21 (nowhere near that close) nightmare loss Saturday to Oklahoma State. There is some reason for a Pitt fan to plan to spend four or five hours he’s never getting back at Heinz Field hoping to find out that the team he roots for has reached a level of respectability that would prevent a total blowout by a Top-10 team at home.

Oklahoma State might as well have been playing Georgia State or Mercer. How much worse could it have been? It was the kind of loss that has Pitt back in their now 30-year routine of taking at least one step back after taking two forward.

An embarrassingly small crowd, ESPN’s closeups of the few who stayed dozing off and that score brought back memories of the worst of times for Pitt football. It was another indicator of just how far the program is from where it has hoped to be since Jackie Sherrill was run off in 1981.

• Seeing as how they would have to go undefeated for the rest of the season to avoid it, it’s safe to say the Pirates are about to have another losing season. That will mean seven winning seasons in the last 34 years. The Steelers have had eight losing seasons in the last 34 years, the Penguins nine. But don’t let anybody tell you that the salary cap has anything to do with it.

• The fans in Cleveland deserve what’s happening with their sports teams lately – not including the Browns, of course. The Indians’ loss to the Kansas City Royals Friday night ended their winning streak at 22, the longest in American League history and four short of the major league record set by the 1916 New York Giants. It’s one of the greatest accomplishments in American sports history and astounding when you consider how many great American League teams there have been in more than 100 years.

But it’s not a championship and it won’t mean much if the Indians don’t get back to the World Series, where they lost Game 7 in extra innings last year. Harry Truman was president the last time they won a World Series, in 1948.

No Cleveland resident under the age of 80 has any appreciation for what it’s like for the local baseball team to win a championship. That’s a lot of suffering. Fans there are just like Western Pa. fans. They’re real. When they had a good NFL team they filled an 80,000 seat stadium. When they finally had a respectable baseball team and a new ballpark they filled it up 455 games in row from June 1995 to April 2001. That streak is even more impressive than the Penguins’ sellout streak that will surpass 500 this season. They deserve a winner.

• The NFL owners and the networks, who pay them billions to televise games, would like to believe that the bad ratings for the first weekend of the season were because of Hurricanes Irma and Harvey drawing people to cable news and The Weather Channel.

Maybe.

Last season, it was blamed on the presidential election.

They might not have any more excuses if the ratings are still down as the season goes on. They all need to admit that the games have become too similar and predictable. Too many dinks. Too many dunks. And too many penalties. It’s also possible that the league is seeing the results of the self-cannibalization of it’s product.

A generation of fans has been raised on fantasy football and the Red Zone channel. For millions of fans, the box scores have become much more important than the games. Why sit through a three-and-a-half hour games when all you care about are the stats that you can get on your phone? And why watch just one game when you can keep tabs on your fantasy team by watching just the scoring plays on Red Zone?

The hurricanes shouldn’t have had any impact on NFL games in California, but the Rams played in front of a lot empty seats at the L.A. Coliseum and there were lots of empty seats in Santa Clara for the 49ers and the Carolina Panthers. The Los Angeles Chargers are having trouble filling a 27,000 seat stadium.

Business might be boomin’ for Antonio Brown but its not boomin’ for the NFL.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.