"We say Nittany! You say Lions!"

Both my maternal grandparents went to Penn State; this probably means that I should have been raised a Penn State football fan but, see, I grew up in Baltimore and when I was 4 the Colts packed up in the middle of the night and moved to Indianapolis and broke my beloved city's heart -- a heartbreak that even a Ravens Super Bowl cannot quell, I might add; I still know grown men who spit over their shoulders when they see a Mayflower moving van and the only reason I don't is because nice Southern girls don't do that (even if they drink Jack Daniels and say fuck in public) -- so I grew up without football, mostly. The first year my parents were married Carolina lost the national basketball title to Marquette and my father, who married into the Tar Heel family, had his heart broken by the Tar Heels for the first time and became a die-hard fan.

So my younger sister and I were raised Tar Heel basketball fans and Baltimore Orioles fans and football was pretty tertiary to those; it wasn't until Paul Tagliabue denied Baltimore an expansion team that football came into my world view, really. The stories I remember growing up, for example, include my mom saying, "I had a history class with George Karl in college. He never showed up. The guy who took his tests for him didn't show up much either."

But my grandparents had this stuffed Nittany Lion when I was a kid and all the grandchildren, even those of us who didn't grow up to be sportsbloggers like myself, we all adored this stupid thing. When you squeezed its stomach, it said, "YOU SAY JOE PA, I SAY TERNO, JOE PA! TERNO! JOE PA! TERNO" and "YOU SAY NITTANY, I SAY LIONS, NITTANY! LIONS! NITTANY! LIONS!", and it was sort of the funniest thing ever when I was 10 years old. At the end of its lifetime -- because no one in the family knows what happened to it after my grandmother passed away in 2000; if anyone did, it would live in shep.'s and my living room and be a drunken party joke for certain -- it sort of slowed down a little, and shouted for JOE PA in a record played at low speed kind of voice, which was EVEN MORE hysterical mostly because half the grandchildren were of drinking age and family gatherings involved drinking a lot of beer and playing euchre at that point.

My point being: the second weekend of football season, when shep. and I discovered our love/hate relationship with TJ Yates while drinking Bud Lite at Four Corners, there was a really drunk guy in a Penn State jersey watching the PSU/ND game at the table two over from us, and I suddenly remembered the Nittany Lion of my childhood. I told shep. about it, and then I said, "If we post about college football, our tag should totally be 'you say joe pa'."

Because we'd drunk too much Bud Lite at that point, shep. snickered and agreed. And that's why our college football tag is what it is: a tribute to my late grandparents, and to the tiny gnome that is Joe Pa. I love seeing him on the sidelines -- he grabs his players by the helmets and mumbles at them and they go out and pretend they know what he's said, and, you know, he's still a pretty good coach, even if he doesn't really speak English anymore.

You say Joe Pa.

We here at WWTHD? say Terno.

Go Nittany Lions.

(It should be noted: our loyalties, here at WWTHD?, cover the Tar Heels, the Terps when they're not playing the Tar Heels, whoever beats Duke, Joe Paterno but not usually Penn State, the Orioles, the Yankees, the Cubs, the Cardinals, the Padres, the Ravens, the Chargers, anyone who beats the Colts, and Rex Grossman getting sacked. I've probably missed a few, too; we're a multi-talented fanbase.)