Medical Toilet: No joke, The Penn State headline might qualify for GHOAT.

THIS

I smell a conspiracy... we need to find the Penn State equivalent of Deep Throat and get him on this immediately.

... ooooh... I may need to reword the telegram on that one.

SoCalSurfer, aclark1998, ole prophet, Arkanaut, Oysterman, highrye, metamax, save russian jews, D-Liver, Medical Toilet, RoosterCogburn, and Minarets:

Don't know how we missed that one for this week, but I'll tell you what: I'll include the Penn State headline in the running for Headline of the Year in Sports for the last quarter (which will include November). I'll make an exception for it. This is the first time I've had one not show up for me like that, and there's no way in hell I'd normally miss one with that many votes.

I like the Frazier one

The penn state one is awesomely inappropriate, which is why it's so damn funny.

degenerate-afro: Balchinian: The Penn State headline is context-dependent, and therefore does not qualify for the regular HOTY category. Sorry.

No more than the Heavy-D headline. If you didn't know he died, the headline wouldn't make sense.

This is a gray area, I'll admit. On one hand, when a story is breaking (or in the middle of a news churn), most everybody on Fark is familiar with the story, and the headline that gets picked sometimes is contextual to people's familiarity with the specific referenced news article. Some headlines, though, make no sense at all on their own, they are just a sentence until you click the link and open the article. The Penn State one was sort of borderline, but I'm leaning toward it standing alone because the headline is referential to a news story, without being pointless. I was able to understand the basic story from the headline and what it referred to without needing to open the link.

My general test is the napkin test. If I wrote this on a napkin and pushed just the headline across the table to a person who was familiar with stuff in the news and what the main stories were, would they be able to figure it out? A couple of the context Headline of the Year candidates from last year, for reference:

/||||||||| /||||||||

News article up for country song of the year

Three year old girl survives car accident, turns into Lindsay Lohan

and my personal favorite: Cmfudimfz Qbsl bsdijwft up hp pomjof

These are all from here, by the way

degenerate-afro: Unless you read the article, you would naturally assume something else was up with that headline. Although i guess that's more misdirection than context?

Yeah, that one was a misdirect. Funny one, too

SoCalSurfer: How is "In the end, Penn State comes up a little behind" not on there?

Did you see the part that said: " Headlines Of The Week for Sun 2011-11-06 to Sat 2011-11-11"?

The headline you're referring to was posted on November 12th.

Unfreakable: SoCalSurfer, aclark1998, ole prophet, Arkanaut, Oysterman, highrye, metamax, save russian jews, D-Liver, Medical Toilet, RoosterCogburn, and Minarets:

Don't know how we missed that one for this week, but I'll tell you what: I'll include the Penn State headline in the running for Headline of the Year in Sports for the last quarter (which will include November). I'll make an exception for it. This is the first time I've had one not show up for me like that, and there's no way in hell I'd normally miss one with that many votes.

You didn't miss it, Tony. It wasn't posted to the sports tab until November 12th.

Made it in...you were wrong Dad