Why demeaning letter to Penn State player doesn't stun me

I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear this week that a Penn State alumnus sent safety Jonathan Sutherland a letter complaining about his dreadlocks and lamenting the era when football players conformed to a restrictive code of appearance. But maybe that’s because I grew up in central Pennsylvania, so I’ve been hearing sentiments like this for years.

Dave Peterson, a 1966 graduate of Penn State, told writer Chip Minemyer that he didn’t mean to incite a social media firestorm after Sunderland's teammates shared online the letter that has widely been condemned as racist.

“I was just disgruntled about some of the hairdos that we're seeing,” Petersen told Minemyer. “You think of Penn State as a bunch of clean-cut guys. And you do see so many who are clean-cut. But the tattoos and the hair — there are a lot of guys with hair coming down their backs and it just looks awful.”

This is not exactly an anomalous way of thinking, particularly among older generations of Penn State fans. It's a group that still feels a sentimental attachment to the Joe Paterno era, even after it ended in the horrifying cloud of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. There has long been a sense that Penn State existed somewhere out of time; the town’s quaint nickname, Happy Valley, alluded to a sort of Pleasantville that wouldn’t succumb to the whims of modernity.

That ethos was personified in 1987, when Paterno's "clean cut" Nittany Lions faced off against the brash Miami Hurricanes in the Fiesta Bowl. Their stunning victory over the Hurricanes to win the national championship became a heavy-handed metaphor, with Penn State portrayed as the good guys and Miami seen as loudmouths and scofflaws.

All these years later, Petersen told Minemyer, he wants Penn State’s players to “get cleaned up” and stop looking like “Miami and Florida State guys.”

The subtext of that is clear now; it’s not even subtext anymore. This is a statement about race and about Miami and Florida State being some of the first programs that allowed black players to express themselves fully and completely both on and off the field. And the fact that a letter like this surfaced is probably not a coincidence.

We’re on the verge of a reckoning in college football and in college sports as a whole. Players are already empowered in new ways through the transfer portal, which allows them to more easily move between schools. A California bill may finally force the NCAA to address the notion of players being able to benefit off their own names and likenesses and will likely lead to a larger discussion about athletes getting a bigger piece of the millions of dollars football programs like Penn State bring in. And social media, for all of its toxic flaws, allows a player like Sutherland to highlight an ugly and regressive statement like the letter he received from Petersen.

By now even the most powerful interests at a university like Penn State recognize that they cannot let these antiquated ideas about power stand without refuting them. Penn State coach James Franklin issued a statement this week. So, too, did Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour.

And maybe it doesn’t mean much to condemn the racism in Petersen’s letter, but I’d like to think the larger point is clear: College sports are changing, and programs like Penn State must change as well or they’ll get left behind.

Think what you like about Paterno’s legacy — his authoritarian ideals about appearance may have played well in the mid-1960s, but we’re not going back to those days, as much as a certain percentage of the country wishes we would. And if, like Dave Petersen, you think this new reality “looks awful,” you’re welcome to turn away.