Penn State (3-6, 0-6 Big Ten) vs. Michigan State (3-6, 0-6 Big Ten), Saturday, 3:30 PM ET (CBS)
For All the Marbles (But No Room Left on the Trophy)
Saturday brings us the almost annual contrived rivalry meeting between Penn State and Michigan State — two proud land-grant institutions, now reduced to clawing at each other like raccoons over a dumpster buffet, fighting for a trophy that looks like it was assembled during an eighth-grade shop class gone horribly wrong.
Yes, the Land-Grant Trophy — the late George Perles’s magnum opus of mahogany mediocrity. A lopsided shrine to bad carpentry, adorned with tourist postcards, dime-store figurines, and topped with the same plastic football player that came on the participation trophies handed out at Pee Wee banquets in 1967. The only thing missing is the bag of marbles this game is allegedly played for, but apparently there wasn’t room between the Nittany Lion bookend and the bust of Sparty that looks like it was rescued from a garage sale.
What if some enterprising, latter-day Nittany Lion or Spartan masochist were to take on the task of updating the trophy to include a drawer for all the marbles? Boy, then we’d really have a trophy worth playing for! Have we lost our marbles? You betcha! Dayummm!
The Combatants (Dumb and Dumber)
Both teams come into this titanic struggle with identical records of 3-6 and both are at 0–6 in Big Ten play, tied for last place with hapless Purdue and fighting to avoid the ceremonial basement broom. Penn State’s offense sputters like a ‘72 Vega, while Moo U’s defense couldn’t stop a cold front. If you’re looking for elite football, try watching Antiques Roadshow — the appraisals are faster-paced.
Vegas, in its infinite optimism, opened the line with Penn State favored by 7.5 points. This feels generous, considering neither team has demonstrated the will to live, much less to score. The over/under is 48.5, which would require both teams to find the end zone more than twice — doable, but subject to more variables than the Econometric Model of the United States.
To add to its offensive woes, Moo U. has a quarterback problem. Starter Aidan Chiles was benched for the Minnesota game due to declining performance in the wake of a hard hit he suffered against UCLA. The unpronounceable but proud Croatian (I’m guessing) redshirt freshman Alessio Milivojevic (mi-li-vo-YEV-ich, maybe) started against Minnesota. Moo U. head coach Jonathan Smith hasn’t commented on whether Milivojevich will be the #1 guy or whether he’ll employ a QB rotation. “They both have skill sets,” Smith muttered.
Nittany Turkey Keys to the Game
1. Don’t Win.
Possession of the Land-Grant Trophy comes with the solemn responsibility of finding somewhere to store the damned thing. Facilities directors have nightmares about it. Michigan State once stashed it behind a water heater for two years before anyone noticed.
2. Don’t Turn the Ball Over — Unless You’re Handing It to the Referee to End the Game.
Punting early and often might be the best strategy. Whoever ends up with the fewest offensive snaps might also end up with their dignity intact.
3. Keep the Trophy Hidden.
If Penn State wins, Terry Smith should accidently on purpose forget to put it on the plane back to University. If the baggage handlers ignore his orders, the equipment manager should drop it off at the Penn State University Composting Facility on the way back to campus from the airport.
Da Wedda
Surprisingly, after the weekend snow, the weather is forecast to be relatively mild for the game. Partly cloudy, with a high of 54 and some showers late in the day that might impact both incompetent offenses.
Da Bottom Lion
Here is where we end the sarcasm and get serious. Or not. Yea, verily, we have reached the part where the summary sentence will be delivered. Indeed, ’tis time for the Official Turkey Poop Prediction, which is worth its weight in electrons perturbed during its creation.
Regardless of the winner, the Land-Grant Trophy will once again find itself wedged awkwardly in a storage closet between the blocking sled and a box of broken chin straps — exactly where it belongs. All will be right with the world. So yes, the game matters, technically. But as Chico Harlan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette once put it, the trophy looks like “an oversized Rubik’s Cube after five minutes in the mouth of a rottweiler.” That’s the spirit of the thing right there.
Enough with the Trophy, Let’s Get to the Michigan State Game, Already!
The opening spread favored Penn State by 7.5 in the Battle for the Bottom with an over/under of 48.5. ESPN’s Peter Meter gives Penn State a 79.3% chance of winning. That’s a lot of undue respect from the gambling and sports media communities.
Let’s do some sports psycho-babble analysis involving who will wind up with no conference wins. Each team would need to run the table to get to a 6-6 record, and neither will. They don’t get to draw positions for draft choices like the NFL (yet), so not good reason to tank games either. Moo U will definitely lose to Iowa, and PSU will lose to Nebraska. That leaves beatable Maryland for Moo U and beatable Rutgers for Penn State. Thus, Saturday’s game is the proverbial rubber match. It determines who might share the Big Ten cellar with god-awful Purdue. The Boilermakers are at 0-7 with potential losses to Washington and Indiana remaining.
And so…
The Lions will probably stumble their way to an ugly 20–16 win, helped by Moo U’s legendary ability to self-destruct in the fourth quarter. However, the true loser will be whichever poor Penn State equipment manager has to haul the cubic monstrosity back to State College. I’m inclined to take the under.
Sidebar: The Academia of Awfulness
If you ever needed proof that design by committee is a crime against aesthetics, look no further than the Land-Grant Trophy — that walnut-and-glue shrine to indecision that could only have been birthed within the walls of academia.
You can practically hear the meeting:
“Let’s symbolize both schools’ proud traditions!”
“Good idea — add some postcards.”
“And maybe a miniature Nittany Lion!”
“Don’t forget Sparty!”
“We’ll need a plastic football player on top!”
“And shelves — for gravitas!”
Six hours and three pots of coffee later, someone nodded and said, “Perfect!” And thus was born this monument to mediocrity — a Frankenstein of mahogany and sentimentality that looks like it was rejected from a middle school shop fair for “structural instability.”
The Land-Grant Trophy is what happens when higher education’s bureaucratic instinct meets its aesthetic blindness — a physical manifestation of committee culture, where everyone has input and no one has taste. It’s less a trophy than a dissertation defense on the futility of consensus.
As the late political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre once observed — in a line later popularized by Kissinger and still tattooed on the soul of every frustrated academic —
“In academia, the battles are so bitter because the stakes are so small.”
And nowhere are those stakes smaller than here, where two universities with billion-dollar endowments fight over a trophy that looks like a condemned credenza.
Come Saturday, one of them will “win” this relic — and the other will win peace of mind, unburdened by the obligation to display it.
Which means, once again, academia triumphs in the worst way possible.
I’ll be back after the game with something interesting to say, or maybe I’ll be asleep.
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Big Al says
I’d be more inclined to take the over in this game since both teams’defenses suck worse than their offenses do. Every B1G team Penn State has played this year has scored more than 20 points and Moo U has better offensive talent Northwestern.
If this game were played at the Beav, I’d take Penn State to win. But it isn’t, so Moo U 27 Kitties 24. The season of destiny (i.e. 0-9 in the B1G) continues.
The Nittany Turkey says
Al,
I was clearly insane when I made that 20-16 prediction. Either that or I figured both teams had given up for the year. Or maybe I had just been traumatized watching that god-awful Steelers game, where the halftime score looked like it was going to be 5-3 until the Chargers scored with 12 seconds left after intercepting Rodgers. So, that POS game inspired me to send my brains packing for a while.
In any case, I’m kind of cheering for you to be right about the Nits’ perfect Big 10 season. There ought to be a trophy for the likes of Purdue and PSU’s 2025 fiascoes, maybe featuring a petrified cow chip.
—TNT