"T get tired of these arguments, they're a waste of time."

-- Ken Mannie, Michigan State strength and conditioning coach

In the five weeks we've been working on this story, that quote is the most intelligent thing I've heard.

We set out to do a story on strength training in college football and the differing methods behind it. What quickly became apparent was that we were dealing with two polarized sides that were almost entirely incapable of finding points of agreement.

I wasn't surprised by the passion and zeal with which these men argued. After all, the subject is their careers and the way they have gone about conducting them. I was taken aback by how unwavering some (not all) of our interview subjects were in regards to training methods.

Sitting in State College health clubs, we listened to former students with kinesiology degrees rail against Penn State's HIT program much like McCarthy about the damn Commies. They would have you believe strength and conditioning coach John Thomas were secretly trying to undermine the team.

During the rather tenuous research phase of this project, we found more web sites that made thorough cases for either HIT or Olympic-style training. These same sites spent as much, if not more, space condemning the opposite side for its irresponsible and unenlightened views. The most interesting ones never made mention of supporting a particular style at all, instead focusing all the attention on bashing one side.

This same level of partisanship may extend up to the ranks of conditioning coaches.

However, (most) coaches wisely display a more diplomatic attitude.

Thomas, for one, makes a point never to criticize other programs and, after some initial hesitance, was very open to our queries, never refusing to answer a question. He's not alone as Mannie, Nebraska strength coach Boyd Eply and Texas strength coach Jeff Madden all brought up good points about the opposing side and talked about the two not being as far apart as perceived.

One of the few sentiments that surfaced repeatedly from all sides was genetic superiority, the idea that the best athletes could succeed in any system, be it HIT, Olympic-style or pretty much any workout devised.

That is the one thing we kept coming back to because it points to the biggest truth we could uncover: a weightlifting program is a weightlifting program, not a football program.

That might not seem like a brilliant revelation, but any number of people we've encountered believe Penn State loses football games solely because it is weak. We have even been told that they are intimidated by the size of the oppositions' guns after the pre-game warm-ups. While it's true I've never been in the tunnel before a game, my "journalistic intuition" says no Nittany Lions were quivering before taking the field against Iowa.

But people believe it.

As this story ran over the course of the week, we've gotten a few e-mails, again not anything all that surprising. What did catch us off guard was the number of responses we got from people who wanted to talk to us about Penn State's system -- why it is great, why it is terrible, why it is responsible for the downfall of Western Civilization as we know it, etc.

The best part about these e-mails was the almost ubiquitous final paragraph explaining that the sender could only act as our "Deep Throat" and never be named until after the death of their children because of all the friends they still maintained within the program.

Maybe these loyal readers do have the connections to reveal an Oliver Stone-sized conspiracy, but the story was pretty set. More importantly, that wasn't the story.

We wanted to deal with the fact and not the hype -- the problem is the hype is what people want to believe because it screams louder than I ever could.