The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Search This Site

Enter keyword(s) below to search for relevant articles.

Home Archives for Nittany Lions

They’re Lean, They’re Mean, They’re Golden

Posted on Written by

To listen to Joe Paterno’s Tuesday press conference, you would think that Southern Cal or Oklahoma were coming to town this week. But, noooooooooooooooooooo. Joe used glowing words, as usual, to describe the Patsy of the Week, Temple University (1-2, 0-1 MAC). The gambling line favors home team Penn State by only 28 points.

Last year’s game was played at Lincoln Financial Field, still arguably Penn State home turf, but the punters gave Temple the home field advantage (usually a field goal) by establishing the line at 24. (Punter is a poor choice of a synonym for gambler, unacceptably ambiguous in this context, which is why I chose it.)

Would I please stop interrupting me with these side comments, already?!?

OK, I’m bored. I admit it.

This Turkey predicted a 44-13 score for that game. Following is the entirety of my game recap from last year.

Here’s a paragraph about the Temple game. Penn State won, 31-0, despite a completely lifeless, uninspired performance by the Nittany Lions. And now, the news.

The Turkey is seldom, if ever, so terse. Bombast is my equivalent of Tony Montana’s “leetle friend” in Scarface, but I couldn’t find words to describe the vacuousness of that damn boring game. Apparently, I wasn’t impressed.

Let us hope that we get a better show this year. PSU is playing at home, and the spread has widened. So much for Temple improving in the eyes of the betting populace. Admittedly, the gamblers might be surprised, inasmuch as Temple has shown improvements in a few areas, albeit not on the scoreboard or the won/loss column. Given their heartbreaking losses to UConn and Buffalo, they were a John McCain heartbeat away from being 3-0 Sarah Palin starbursts.

(The foregoing was a gratuitous allusion to current political issues hastily devised to boost The Nittany Turkey’s visibility in Google searches. I should add some other stuff, too, like: sex, MILFs, Lehman Brothers, Casey Anthony, Obama, Obama, Obama, almighty Obama, AIG, and hot naked Asian teen Viagra babes with debt consolidation issues. Let’s see how many hits this shameless ploy gets me!)

Where do Temple and Penn State best match up on the stat sheet? Kickoff returns. Penn State is currently #1 in the nation with a 35.11 average, while Temple is #4 with a 33 yard average. Very impressive, but meaningless in view of the quality of opposition thus far.

Temple still ranks #33 in scoring defense, thanks to holding Army to 7 points and UConn to 9. Alas, most recently they screwed up, allowing Buffalo to ring up 30, the final seven being on a game winning Hail Mary pass with no time left on the clock. That was after quarterback Adam DiMichele had lofted a touchdown spiral of his own to Bruce Francis with 38 seconds left on the scoreboard ticker. Temple was that close to actually having a winning record both overall and in the MAC. Nevertheless, the Owls are off to their best start since 1998.

DiMichele, a senior from McKee’s Rocks, just outside Pittsburgh, is a great player to build an offense around. Temple might have their best shot at a decent record this year with him at the helm. Last week, he went 24-33 for 285 yards and 3 TDs, with no INTs. ????? ????????? ?? ??? ????? He also ran for 58 yards, quite an all-around performance in a losing effort. (Yeah, I know. It was against Buffalo.) In fact, DiMichele leads the team in rushing.

In any case, Penn State (3-0, 0-0 Big Ten), ranked #15, should have no problems handling the Owls. Another week, another cupcake. View it as an opportunity for more reps for Pat Devlin and Don Pablo Cianciolo. We’ll also get to see how Mike Lucian fares in his new role providing D-line depth. Otherwise, the only thing interesting about this game will be if EggMan should happen to think Temple can beat the spread, in which case I’m going to win another bottle of Boone’s Farm.

Pay heem. Pay that myen his money.

—Teddy KGB, Rounders

Ho hum. Let’s get to Illinois already. I’m anxious to find out whether this team is either truly competitive or yet again a Big Ten middle-of-the-pack also-ran, the latter having been the case more often than not during the Nittany Lions’ Big Ten history. If they’re good, they might actually be able to beat a mediocre Michigan this year. In view of Michigan’s suckiness thus far under new head coach el Señor Ricardito Rodriguez, it might be anticlimactic, if not meaningless. Don’t let me count chickens before they hatch. The boys have to get past the next four opponents before tackling Big Blue the Unbeatable.

I’m too busy coming up with old metaphors and hokey nicknames, anyway.

I was looking for a good thematic dish to serve at my viewing party and I came up with Spotted Owl Stew. Unfortunately, on the way to procuring the main ingredient, I was accosted by naked PETA protesters and whacko environmentalists wearing tinfoil hats. I ran. My compadres will just have to be happy with salmon, the owl of the sea. (I just made that up.)

It will be interesting to see what the Ganja Three are up to this weekend, now that two of the three have been formally charged. Will Quarless actually get in the game? Will Evans and Koroma dress? I’m betting on “no” on all three propositions.

Tex Cobb
Tex Cobb

And now, the long awaited Official Turkey Poop Prediction. But first, here’s a bit of Temple trivia. Did you know that professional boxer turned actor Tex Cobb (pictured here) graduated magna cum laude from Temple? He did indeed, in January of this year. ?????? ????? Cobb, 57, earned a bachelor’s degree in Sport and Recreation Management. (Wow, that’s the same degree that Anthony Morelli got!) Cobb’s most famous fight was the 1982 fight against heavyweight champ Larry Holmes, won easily by Holmes, a fight so one-sided and bloody that TV commentator Howard Cosell complained bitterly about the travesty throughout the fight and vowed to never again cover professional boxing. He held true to his word. When asked if he would consider a rematch, Cobb exhibited quite a sense of humor, stating that he didn’t think Holmes would agree, because Holmes’ “hands couldn’t take it.” Cobb’s son Joshua played linebacker for the Owls, and was enrolled concurrently with his semi-famous dad. (I figured that every other PSU blog would be talking about Bill Cosby as Temple’s most famous alum, so I wanted to be different—because hell, I am different—but I digress.) Las Vegas has the current spread set at 28 and the over/under at 54. ???? ??????? ????? This suggests a final score of about 41-13. This Turkey wonders whether the PSU offense won’t be full of themselves after three cakewalks, and whether the defense won’t be on their heels looking forward to Illinois. Penn State 38, Temple 10.

We’ll be back with a report on Sunday. Or maybe Monday. Tuesday or Wednesday are possibilities, too. Whenever the hell I get around to it, in other words. Plus, we have to coordinate things with our very busy guest reporter, Dr. William H. Cosby.

Just So’s Ya Know…

Posted on Written by

The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes run amok, even if the mice are hopelessly addicted to social anxiety disorder drugs. Doubtless my faithful readers (both of you—Hi, Mom!) are anxiously awaiting my brilliant post mortem on the so-called Syracuse game. Well, you’re not going to get much of one due to extenuating circumstances. So, tough!

I spent the weekend in the hospital, all wired up and monitored. I had some chest pains, which sometimes means that an old geezer like this Turkey is about to gobble his last gobble, so I went to the ER. Under the “Better Safe Than Legally Liable” principle, the ER doc, a pink-cheeked, mid-20s-looking butterball who will be a future coronary case himself, admitted me for 23-hour observation. That was at around 4 PM on Friday.

Alas, what was this Turkey to do? Even if I got out on time, the discharge procedures and the ride home would get me there past the end of the game. In this area, ABC was playing the Georgia Tech vs. Virginia Tech game, so I couldn’t get it on the hospital room TV. That would have been acceptable, even if I wasn’t in the brand new wing with the big LCD flat-screens in each room. I wound up ordering DirecTV to record the game on my DVR by using that satellite company’s nifty remote recording set-up via their web site from my Blackberry. Modern technology is great, but I couldn’t stand not to be able to get the game in real time.

I settled for watching the Michigan vs. Notre Dame game while I accessed ESPN.com from my notebook, which Artificially Sweetened had brought for me. Fortunately, the hospital provides Wi-Fi for its coronary patients. In this case, it would have to provide me with the appropriate adrenaline jolts. The game tracker thing worked in a pinch. I was able to watch drives via a chart and textual play-by-play in almost real time. The nurses thought I was completely nuts, with the TV bouncing between channels, the computer splayed out, and the Blackberry repeatedly chirping out score alerts.

Very quickly, the game was out of hand (or in hand, depending on from whose perspective you’re looking at it). My only EKG bender came on the second play of the game when Daryll Clark fumbled the ball away. That was quickly followed by our defense forcing a fumble on the next play, which made me laugh in comic relief. The game was never in doubt from that point on.

My testing was completed on Sunday, after a couple of false starts. The treadmill stress test was originally scheduled for 9 AM, but it had to be rescheduled to 11:15 AM because someone (and I now know who it was) was supposed to have ordered the radioisotope dose the previous day but didn’t. Then, my cardiologist had an emergency at another hospital, so my test was moved to 12:30.

In the meanwhile, I got a chest shave. Now, I’ve had treadmill stress tests before, and in those instances only the areas where the contact pads were to be installed got shaved. This time, I was completely shorn.

When I originally met with the cardiologist in my room, he was rather pessimistic about my chances, wanting to transfer me to the big hospital because he believed that I would do just OK on the treadmill and would still need to get the cardiac catheter to determine how major the blockage was. He wanted to do it at the big hospital in case he had to “open me up” right then and there. He even mentioned that Tim Russert had a good treadmill and still keeled over unexpectedly. These bright, cheery, reassuring words led to my suffering what I presume to have been a panic attack while the Ohio State vs. USC game wrapped up on my non-LCD, non-flat-screen room TV. After some nitroglycerin and a shot of morphine, I was fine. I mean really fine. I still had chest pains, but I didn’t care. Yay, morphine!

So, anyhow, with that glum forecast, I was looking forward to proving to this pessimist that I could handle the treadmill. I told the doc that I had to be home by 8 PM to see the Steelers game. I hopped on the treadmill and did my thing. The nuclear medicine tech knew me from the gym where we both work out. She told the doc and his other tech that I would probably do at least 10 minutes, because she had seen how hard I work out. Both the cardiologist and the technician were indeed surprised that I was able to do 11 minutes of the Bruce Protocol. My pulse simmered down rapidly from maximum, too, and my measured ejection fraction was 69%, for those Turkey fans with medical (or hypochondriacal) orientation. The imaging studies at rest and after exercise revealed no significant blockage or other abnormalities. The cardiologist told me I was going home and could follow up with him if I wanted.

Then, it was a matter of time before my floor nursie got my discharge signed off and sent me home, well in time for the Steelers.

Surprisingly—or maybe not—I had no desire to rehash the Penn State game. It is still there on the DVR, but I might never watch it. I know, I know! I am an irresponsible Nittany Lion blogger, not bothering to watch every nuance of Daryll Clark and Pat Devlin. But, hell, a scrimmage like that one proves absolutely nothing about anybody. They might as well have been playing Discovery Middle School. Besides, I don’t take myself that seriously. There are plenty of pedestrian reports out there on the Internet with more facts than I could dig up. Read them and then come back here to hang out with someone who has more opinions than facts. I’m easier to argue with!

I wish people would quit making comparisons to 1994 and 2005 teams, already. It’s just too early in the season for that kind of crap. What games have PSU played? A scrimmage with an FCS team; another scrimmage with an Oregon State team that was a shadow of its former self; and a walkover with a hapless, has-been Syracuse. So please shut the hell up with those comparisons. We have another cakewalk this weekend, and then the going gets tough. We’ll have nicely padded stats going into the Illinois game, but that’s when the tests of team character and efficacy begin. Until then, I don’t want to hear about the “greatness” of this team.

Sadly, with my weekend hospital stint, our guest reporter for the Syracuse game backed out on us. Hillary was busy with other things and she didn’t want to do it without me. However, Dr. Bill Cosby is still on board for the Temple game wrap-up next week.

This Turkey will return later in the week for a look at the Temple Owls.

How Did I Miss That?

Posted on Written by

I can’t believe that I missed it! Presidential candidate Barack Obama, stumping in Pennsylvania last week, called the Penn State football team “The Nittley Lions”? While feigning being a college football fan to attempt to regain the votes his “clinging to their guns and religion” faux pas in San Francisco lost, he blew any hope of establishing credibility on the chosen subject. The only mystery is why didn’t I hear about it until it was mentioned by Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon on Pardon the Interruption on Monday evening. How the hell could I have missed something this hilarious?

This Mouse thinks Senator Obama is running scared and is trying a little too hard to get the Pennsylvania working class vote. If he just would shut his mouth, he probably would get their vote, but if he keeps putting his foot in it, enough of them could become disgusted enough to make a difference. You and I know small town Pennsylvanians. Obama is on thin enough ice with them to begin with. He ought to stop pressing his luck.

I’m lovin’ every minute of it! Let Obama keep on revealing the faker he really is.