NCAA president Mark Emmert said this summer after levying severe sanctions against Penn State that the school perpetuated “a ‘football first’ culture that ultimately enabled [former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky’s] serial child sexual abuse to occur.”
Despite that statement, the NCAA’s online merchandise shop did not recognize Penn State and its “football first culture” as a one of the Top 100 teams in college athletics when it comes to sales today -- even though Penn State is one of the top athletic departments in the country in terms of revenue.
In fact, Penn State wasn’t even listed on the “All Teams” portion of the online shop. Coincidence? Cory Giger of the Altoona Mirror made some phone calls to the website and was given two different answers; whether or not you care to believe them is your decision to make. Here’s the site’s response to the inquiry:“As of today, the NCAA has taken all the Penn State merchandise off our website, so until we’re further updated ... we don’t know what’s happening. They won’t let exactly us know why. But it is off the site,” a customer service representative said at about 10:45 a.m.
A few minutes later, Meier Ravich, vice president of communications for the website’s owner, Fanatics Retail Group, explained why the Penn State merchandise was not available.
“It’s a technical glitch that’s preventing the Penn State merchandise from appearing on the site,” he said. “They’re working to get it back up. It should be up very shortly.”
Ravich couldn’t give an exact time for when the Penn State merchandise would be available but noted, “it should be up soon.”
As a certain consulting duo from “Office Space” would say, “We’ve fixed the glitch.”
(Actually, the “glitch” has been fixed; the Penn State page is back up)
(Hat tip: Big Lead)
