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Posted

Big story in Philly paper.

https://www.inquirer.com/college-sports/penn-state/penn-state-lawsuit-james-franklin-alleged-meddling-20240521.html?query=james franklin

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Posted

I used to think there was something Butch Jones-esque about James Franklin.  Now I think there may be something James Franklin-escue about Butch Jones.  What a tool.

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Posted
  On 5/22/2024 at 4:28 PM, Spider2YBanana said:

I dated a girl who is a Penn St alum and you're right, she would die on that hill. She really thinks Sandusky was set up. Not even kidding. 

God she was fine as fuck, but fucking crazy. Miss the sex, not the talking. If only she were a mute.

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oh you did?  what did she look like?

Posted
  On 5/22/2024 at 4:02 AM, Biff Tannen said:

Penn State and Baylor are two schools that should have been stripped of all major sports.  Fuck them both.

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Yep.

Penn State should have been burned to the ground when the Sandusky/Paterno shit came out.  But they didn't care.  And they won't care now.  The PSU football coach could sacrifice a baby on the 50 yard line during a game, eat its still-beating heart, and the PSU faithful would find a way to look right past it.

Shitty program, shitty university, shitty state, shitty people.  It's all shit, all the way down.

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Posted
  On 5/22/2024 at 11:34 PM, SurlyGator said:

I used to think there was something Butch Jones-esque about James Franklin.  Now I think there may be something James Franklin-escue about Butch Jones.  What a tool.

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Hopefully this is enough for CDC to remove James Franklin out of his rolodex forever. Prior to Sark, I was terrified we were going to end up with James Franklin. 

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Posted
  On 5/24/2024 at 6:41 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.

Penn State should have been burned to the ground when the Sandusky/Paterno shit came out.  But they didn't care.  And they won't care now.  The PSU football coach could sacrifice a baby on the 50 yard line during a game, eat its still-beating heart, and the PSU faithful would find a way to look right past it.

Shitty program, shitty university, shitty state, shitty people.  It's all shit, all the way down.

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It was a great day when the NCAA stripped Pedo State of JoePedo's wins and made Eddie Robinson once again the all-time winningest corch in NCAA history.  I had the fortune to meet Coach Rob several times while growing up in north Louisiana and he was a true gentleman and class act.  I respected the hell out of that man.

Then two weeks later (not really, but felt that way), the NCAA does a complete 180 and gives those W's back to Pedo State.  I honestly think my downward trajectory in CFB interest began with that move.

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Posted
  On 5/22/2024 at 4:02 AM, Biff Tannen said:

Penn State and Baylor are two schools that should have been stripped of all major sports.  Fuck them both.

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MSU should probably be included in the hall of shame. 

There is a lot of bad shit out there in college sports, but the A team of cultural evil is A1 PSU A2 Baylor B MSU

I'm in no way diminishing shit of other schools but the long term continued institutionalized crime organizations of these 3 really stand out to me.

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Posted

Patterson was hired in Nov 2013, and his short list to replace Brown included Shaw, Franklin, and Strong. 

Having to suffer and wander in the wilderness through the Strong and Herman years is actually better than having hired Franklin.  

  • 8 months later...
Posted

James Franklin is a scumbag.  But for Penn State, he seems.pretty normal.

That program is awful.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/us/penn-state-medical-coaches-trainers.html

  Quote

Early in the 2014 football season, a Nike representative entered the Penn State athletic trainer’s office and confronted the football team’s two doctors and head trainer.

The representative ran down a list of players, including the star quarterback, whose socks and shoes had recently been taped over to help stabilize previous injuries. The tape covered the Nike swoosh, and the representative wanted it stopped, court testimony showed.

Soon, the coach, James Franklin, began to interfere, requiring the trainer to provide a list of players who needed their ankles taped over their shoes, along with an explanation. The episode was just one instance that troubled Scott Lynch, the head team doctor, who had begun to feel that in the face of pressure from the coach and administrators, he was the only line of defense for the athletes. He complained to supervisors about the coach’s meddling with medical decisions. Ultimately, Dr. Lynch was removed from his position. Then he sued.

Last year a Pennsylvania jury awarded Dr. Lynch $5.25 million in damages for wrongful termination. The trial offered a rare glimpse into how a high-profile college football team handled decisions around injuries — and revealed the pressure on trainers and doctors to greenlight students to get back on the field, despite reservations.

“College sports are broken, and I think they’re beyond repair,” Dr. Lynch said in an interview. “There’s way too much money that’s getting in the way of people making good decisions. Nobody’s protecting the athletes.”

College sports will even more closely resemble professional leagues later this year if the terms of an antitrust lawsuit settlement are approved, compelling schools to pay athletes. But unlike college athletes, professionals are represented by labor unions and have more autonomy over their medical decisions.

The examples from Dr. Lynch’s lawsuit date between 2015 to 2019. But there are signs that concerns still exist at Penn State and beyond.

In 2022, Penn State football players themselves expressed concern around medical care, but their attempt to organize — including a request for a third-party representative on medical decisions — was opposed by the school and the Big Ten Conference and went nowhere.

In October, a Louisiana State player sued the school, saying that a coach had told him he could lose his starting spot after having complained of headaches. He was diagnosed weeks later with a brain tumor. The family of a Bucknell player who died during a workout last summer says the school has not been forthcoming about what happened to their son.

In a statement, L.S.U. said its health care contractor provides exceptional medical care for its athletes, but otherwise declined to comment. Bucknell said in a statement that it plans to share more information with the player’s family once it is further along in its investigation.

‘The Wild West’

A 2019 survey by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association hinted at the scope of the problem: Nearly one-fourth of the 1,800 respondents said that they did not have medical autonomy, and more than one-third said that coaches had influence on the hiring and firing of medical staff. Nearly one in five reported a coach playing an athlete who had not been medically cleared.

A year before Dr. Lynch was removed at Penn State, Moira Novak was ousted as the director of athletic medicine at the University of Minnesota; she says she was viewed as an obstacle to winning when she reported what she had viewed as unethical — or illegal — behavior.

“College athletics is the Wild West when it comes to medical services,” Ms. Novak said in an interview. “I’m sure there’s some that do a decent job. But if I had a son or daughter who was a college athlete, I’d make sure they know they have to be their own advocate.”

Penn State said in a statement that it was “extremely disappointed” in the jury’s verdict. The statement added that athletes participate only with the independent approval of the athletic department’s medical team and that Mr. Franklin did not influence athletes’ medical care. “Throughout James Franklin’s tenure, he has worked tirelessly to build a program focused on the well-being of student-athletes,” the statement said.

Defense attorneys portrayed Mr. Franklin’s questioning of medical decisions as the routine seeking of information.

Mr. Franklin, who has seven seasons remaining on a 10-year, $85 million contract, declined an interview request through an athletic department spokeswoman, and he is not a party in the lawsuit. The coach and Penn State were dropped as defendants because of a missed filing deadline, a ruling Dr. Lynch is appealing. His former employer, Hershey Medical Center, which is owned by Penn State University Health, and his former supervisor, Dr. Kevin Black, are appealing the verdict.

But the judge in the case, Andrew Dowling, wrote a recent opinion urging that the appeal by the defendants be denied because they had “prioritized their interest of protecting the Penn State Football team and Mr. Franklin rather than the health, safety and welfare of the football players.”

During the trial, the jury heard nearly a dozen stories, many corroborated, from Dr. Lynch about what he saw firsthand as the head orthopedic surgeon for the Penn State athletic department and football team doctor.

The jury heard that Mr. Franklin had pressured Dr. Lynch to allow the former star running back Saquon Barkley, who had missed the previous game with a sprained ankle, to return without passing recovery protocols; urged Dr. Lynch to withhold information from a player with a knee injury so that he might return quickly; and suggested hanging a sign in the trainer’s room that read “the lazy, overweight, unmotivated and injured football player look the same.”

When Mr. Franklin yelled at him, ignored him or hung up on him, Dr. Lynch held his ground — until he was removed from his job in 2019.

Dr. Black told him the reason was because he was not a full-time resident of State College, Pa., but Dr. Lynch owned a condominium downtown. He did not have full operating privileges at Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College but did at Hershey Medical Center, a renowned hospital with specialists who were rare at Mount Nittany.

Rob Windsor, a former defensive lineman who finished his career at Penn State and played briefly in the N.F.L., testified that during his senior season in 2019 a new head trainer, whose predecessor had been forced out, had ignored his repeated requests to meet with Dr. Lynch to discuss a knee injury.

“You had a doctor and a trainer that were standing up for the athletes, and they got rid of them both,” said Mr. Windsor, who like several others who testified said they felt conflicted about speaking out against Penn State because of their affinity for the school.

‘Put up or shut up, or leave’

The N.C.A.A. was founded in 1906 at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt after a surge of deaths among college football players the previous season. The association’s guiding principle: keep athletes safe.

More than a century later, as college athletics became a billion-dollar business, the N.C.A.A. attempted to rein in coaches and athletic directors who were interfering with medical care. In 2017, the association made a policy change, requiring team doctors and trainers to have “unchallengable autonomous authority.” This included keeping athletic directors and coaches out of hiring and firing decisions.

The N.C.A.A. amended its bylaws last year to require schools to conduct an annual review of these policies.

“The failure is, there are no reporting mechanisms and there’s no enforcement,” Brant Berkstresser, the chair of the N.A.T.A.’s council on intercollegiate athletics, said. “A standard without a consequence is not a standard.”

The N.C.A.A. has never punished a school for interfering with medical autonomy, according to the association’s infractions database. An N.C.A.A. spokeswoman declined to comment.

Ms. Novak, who worked from 1998 to 2017 at the University of Minnesota, said she encountered a culture averse to her efforts to protect athletes.

In a memorandum to the university’s Board of Regents in 2018, obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Novak detailed alleged abuses that included a coach urging an athlete who had dizziness and blurred vision following a car crash to withhold that information. The medical team became aware of it only when the athlete was hospitalized after collapsing.

The University of Minnesota said in a statement that return-to-play decisions are made by medical staff and the athlete, that coaches and administrators are not involved.

Ms. Novak considered a lawsuit, but she reached a settlement with the university. When she was pushed out, “it was a very strong message to the remaining staff: Put up or shut up, or leave,” she said.

Dr. Lynch’s case took five years to go to trial, survived repeated attempts to dismiss and was narrowed to exclude Mr. Franklin; Sandy Barbour, the athletic director at the time; and Penn State. Also disallowed was the university’s internal investigation, which was conducted by the athletics integrity officer at the time, Robert A. Boland, in collaboration with the university’s general counsel. This permitted Penn State to shield the report’s findings from scrutiny by asserting attorney-client privilege.

The 15-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, questions Penn State’s rationale for removing Dr. Lynch but makes no conclusions.

The jury returned a verdict in a little over two hours, on Dr. Lynch’s 63rd birthday. He hopes the outcome prompts reforms that prioritize athletes’ health.

Steven Marino, Dr. Lynch’s attorney, was not so sanguine.

“It was a devastating finding of fact, but I don’t think it’s enough to effect change,” Mr. Marino said. “It should have been a $50 million judgment. This is just going to be the cost of doing business.”

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Posted

It’s been a while since I looked at the studies but I’m pretty sure biomechanically there is no significant difference in athletic taping and no taping in terms of ankle stability 

 

Still Franklin is an asshole among assholes. 

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Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 7:03 PM, runthebone said:

Early in the 2014 football season, a Nike representative entered the Penn State athletic trainer’s office and confronted the football team’s two doctors and head trainer.

The representative ran down a list of players, including the star quarterback, whose socks and shoes had recently been taped over to help stabilize previous injuries. The tape covered the Nike swoosh, and the representative wanted it stopped, court testimony showed.

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Let's not leave out Nike in the list of depraved scumbag douchewaffle's here. Fuck them. If they want their stupid swoosh to be seen, they can provide some fucking stickers instead of bitching about stupid shit like that. Morons all of them.

 

  On 2/16/2025 at 7:03 PM, runthebone said:

Steven Marino, Dr. Lynch’s attorney, was not so sanguine.

“It was a devastating finding of fact, but I don’t think it’s enough to effect change,” Mr. Marino said. “It should have been a $50 million judgment. This is just going to be the cost of doing business.”

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Oh look, the scumbag lawyer thinks $5.25 million wasn't a large enough award for wrongful termination.

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Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 7:41 PM, Sawbonz said:

It’s been a while since I looked at the studies but I’m pretty sure biomechanically there is no significant difference in athletic taping and no taping in terms of ankle stability 

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Not a doctor - well, not of medicine - but I am an engineer. I'm having problem differentiating biomechanics from mechanics in general. Unless athletic tape has changed drastically in adhesive and shear strength since days of yore, it seems unlikely that the effectiveness of taping would have little effect. Of course, we were taped directly on the skin, rather than over socks and even shoes, so that likely factors in. 

At least, we gained an appreciation for pains encountered by the girls when shaving legs - as far as up as the tape would be going up.

 

  On 2/16/2025 at 7:41 PM, Sawbonz said:

Still Franklin is an asshole among assholes. 

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This. This seems to be true.

Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 7:47 PM, sith_horn said:

Let's not leave out Nike in the list of depraved scumbag douchewaffle's here. Fuck them. If they want their stupid swoosh to be seen, they can provide some fucking stickers instead of bitching about stupid shit like that. Morons all of them.

 

Oh look, the scumbag lawyer thinks $5.25 million wasn't a large enough award for wrongful termination.

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What did you expect him to say.  I didn't want the 10x settlement?

Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 7:41 PM, Sawbonz said:

It’s been a while since I looked at the studies but I’m pretty sure biomechanically there is no significant difference in athletic taping and no taping in terms of ankle stability 

 

Still Franklin is an asshole among assholes. 

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I can't speak to biomechanical reality nor specific medical knowledge. However, as someone with shitty genetic ankles that I've beat up WAY too much (3 breaks and multiple strains and sprains) tape does exactly fuck all other than soft walking (around the house) or as nice suspension to keep it from jiggling around while on crutches. 

 

Posted

It really seems like Baylor and PSU are in a struggle to the death penalty to out shitty one another. Given this recent news I reticent to see what "hold my beer" news is about to come out of Waco.

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Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 8:34 PM, Tex Long said:

I'm having problem differentiating biomechanics from mechanics in general. Unless athletic tape has changed drastically in adhesive and shear strength since days of yore, it seems unlikely that the effectiveness of taping would have little effect.

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Biomechanics is mechanics as it applies to living organisms. Like I said it’s been a while since I looked at the studies but you can search pubmed they should be there. You cannot apply enough tape to provide external stability without in effect immobilizing the ankle and hind foot. There is probably some pain relief from soft tissue compression and lymphatic mobilization, but no protection from re-injury other than placebo effects
 

Functional splints do work and they are ever evolving 

Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 9:21 PM, Sawbonz said:

Biomechanics is mechanics as it applies to living organisms. Like I said it’s been a while since I looked at the studies but you can search pubmed they should be there. You cannot apply enough tape to provide external stability without in effect immobilizing the ankle and hind foot. There is probably some pain relief from soft tissue compression and lymphatic mobilization, but no protection from re-injury other than placebo effects
 

Functional splints do work and they are ever evolving 

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Of course taping is going to limit mobility. I think that's the point, right. Tape has no compressional strength to speak of, but it has plenty in tension, and adhering it to the structure provides at least some protection from it being pulled apart. I'm surprised that protection is not significant.

From your understanding, it seems that taping ankles is a waste of time and money. Someone should let the schools know, and put a stop to it.

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Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 9:56 PM, Tex Long said:

Of course taping is going to limit mobility. I think that's the point, right. Tape has no compressional strength to speak of, but it has plenty in tension, and adhering it to the structure provides at least some protection from it being pulled apart. I'm surprised that protection is not significant.

From your understanding, it seems that taping ankles is a waste of time and money. Someone should let the schools know, and put a stop to it.

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Except studies show that it doesn’t provide any added protection from tension or torsion injuries. My point is that in order to provide enough stability to protect from those injuries, you would have to supply enough tape to inhibit performance significantly 

 

People do things all of the time that are shown not to work. If athletes want to tape their ankles I don’t give a fuck. My point is no one is putting these athletes at risk of injury by not letting them tape up. They are, however, being gigantic pricks.

Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 7:41 PM, Sawbonz said:

It’s been a while since I looked at the studies but I’m pretty sure biomechanically there is no significant difference in athletic taping and no taping in terms of ankle stability

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would this apply to an ankle brace as well?  I’m genuinely curious and I feel like you (probably) know slightly more about it than I.  in high school and college I sprained one of my ankles a few too many times and it was definitely a bit more unstable than the other.  I would get it taped for sports and it certainly seemed to provide some stability/immobility.  was it just a placebo effect?

Posted
  On 2/17/2025 at 2:20 AM, futureman said:

would this apply to an ankle brace as well?  I’m genuinely curious and I feel like you (probably) know slightly more about it than I.  in high school and college I sprained one of my ankles a few too many times and it was definitely a bit more unstable than the other.  I would get it taped for sports and it certainly seemed to provide some stability/immobility.  was it just a placebo effect?

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Braces definitely are protective. It’s been 20 + years since I covered teams but a lot of players with recurrent sprains would wear rocket socks. They never seemed to catch on as routine equipment though the way ACL braces did for OL

Posted
  On 2/16/2025 at 8:34 PM, Tex Long said:

Not a doctor - well, not of medicine - but I am an engineer. I'm having problem differentiating biomechanics from mechanics in general. Unless athletic tape has changed drastically in adhesive and shear strength since days of yore, it seems unlikely that the effectiveness of taping would have little effect. Of course, we were taped directly on the skin, rather than over socks and even shoes, so that likely factors in. 

At least, we gained an appreciation for pains encountered by the girls when shaving legs - as far as up as the tape would be going up.

 

This. This seems to be true.

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Our asshole coaches always taped 1" above the part of the leg we shaved for taping. They thought it was funny 

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