The eCrozier

It’s always just been better to keep your head away from that kind of stuff.
– Sean Clifford, Penn State Quarterback

Penn State’s football team was undefeated until recently. On November 9, the Nittany Lions travelled to Minnesota to play the Golden Gophers (an outstanding nickname, by the way) who were also undefeated at the time. In a hard-fought game, Penn State came up short, losing 31-26 to Minnesota. It wasn’t Penn State Quarterback Sean Clifford’s best game. While completing over 20 passes for over 300 yards, he still threw three interceptions. That’s the nature of sport. You’ll have your good days and you’ll have your bad days, just like in the rest of one’s life. Clifford had a bad game. It happens. He’s 20-years old after all. He’s still growing up.

While Clifford is barely an adult (his baby face makes him look younger), after the loss to Minnesota he had to learn some hard, adult lessons in our mean-spirited, caustic culture. Clifford needed to delete all his social media accounts on the day after the loss, because he received death threats and nasty messages from, of all people, Penn State fans. He said: “I usually delete it closer to games, but I completely deleted it after the Minnesota game. It’s kind of sad to say, but you know how fans sometimes get … it gets a little crazy. I was kind of, I guess, sick and tired of getting death threats, and some pretty explicit and pretty tough-to-read messages.”

Clifford showed remarkable restraint in his comments when he said: “You know how fans sometimes get…it gets a little crazy.” Really? With all due respect that’s more than “a little crazy.” When did we decide in our culture it was acceptable to make death threats to a 20-year old young man for his part in losing a football game? From the top down in our culture we’re normalizing name-calling and the threatening behavior that often follows it. These crude, twittered pejoratives give permission for others to join in and act similarly. For example, once someone has been labeled “human scum” on Twitter, it’s a logical step to conclude such a person doesn’t even deserve to live. After all, they’re mere “human scum.” Such behavior further erodes our social fabric.

Penn State Head Coach, James Franklin, also noted it wasn’t just Penn State fans engaging in such behavior. He said: “You hate to see it, but the sad thing [is] it’s a part of our reality of our society right now. You see that in a lot of areas; the last thing I want to do is get into other things besides football right now, but you see a lot of things that are behaviors in our society now that we accept that I don’t know why we’re accepting. You see some things from a violence perspective, you see some things that people in positions how they’re conducting themselves, just a lot of things that we’re accepting in our society that we would never have accepted before.” Thanks, Coach Franklin.

As a people, we become what we tolerate and accept. Sometime in the future (and I hate to even write this down), a college athlete will be murdered because he had a bad game. We’re reaping what we’ve allowed to grow.