Penn State (10-2) vs. Ole Miss (10-2)

The final game of the 2023 season is upon us. The #WhoCares Nittany Lions (10-2) will face off with the #WhoCares Rebels (10-2) for the first time ever in the Lions’ first Peach Bowl appearance. The Rebs have played in Peachy Atlanta twice previously, in 1971 and 2014. The bowl game is now played in Mercedez-Benz Stadium, a state-of-the-art NFL indoor venue with a big three-pointed star on the roof, just in case anyone flying over is ripe for a subliminal message from the Stuttgart automaker.

Everything is coming up peaches. Georgia is the Peach State. Did you know that there are seventy-one street names containing the word “Peachtree” in Atlanta alone? Did you know that peach pits contain a chemical that produces hydrogen cyanide? Yes, they do! Peach pits contain a potentially dangerous chemical called amygdalin that can create poisonous cyanide when digested. While swallowing a single pit is unlikely to cause cyanide poisoning, consumption of several unprocessed pits can produce symptoms. Sayyyy, who eats peach pits? They’re tough on the teeth and you cannot swallow them whole. Can you? But I digress.

Hotty Toddy

Inasmuch as Princess Nee-tah-nee’s Lions have had no prior encounters with the Losers of the War of Northern Aggression (aka, the Rebels), our diligent research department here at The Nittany Turkey is here to offer you some suitable bullshit that makes you wonder whether we did any research at all. Such is the way of The Turkey.

Just Like Us… or Not!

Our exclusive information reveals that Ole Miss is the mirror image of Penn State, albeit through a shitty polarizing filter. Both share identical 10-2 records (even though Penn State homeys say PSU’s record is better because we didn’t beat Ohio State or Michigan —whaaaaa?). Ole Miss finished second in the SEC West, while Penn State finished third in the Big Ten East (again, a better finish for PSU homeys because Ohio State and Michigan are in that division). A little two’s-complement mathematics tells you that the Rebs are what Penn State ain’t on offense, while the Nittany Lions are what Ole Miss ain’t on defense. In simple terms, those Ole Missians have the vaunted SEC speed on offense, but they sorta suck on defense. Nevertheless, that fair-to-middlin’ defense might be good enough against the anemic Penn State offense. Although they gave up 52 points to Georgia and 35 to Texas A&M, they held Alabama to 24. They rank 58th in total defense.

As for total offense, the Rebs are 15th, so how will they fare against Penn State’s #1 defense minus Chop Robinson? Junior QB Jaxson Dart has just shy of three thousand yards passing with a 65% completion rate this year, a slight improvement over last year’s 2,974 and 62.4. Dart, who transferred through the bullshit transfer portal from USC in 2022, has twenty TDs and five INTs. Sophomore running back Quinshon Judkins will give Penn State all they can handle. After a spectacular 2022 season, he settled down to just breaking 1,000 yards on 237 carries in 2023, an average of 4.4 with 15 touchdowns. Leading senior receiver Tre Harris had 47 receptions for 851 yards, an average of 18.1 ypc with eight TDs.

The Ole Miss offensive line might be a weak point, as Jaxson has been sacked 26 times this year.

Opt-Outs

What would Bowl Season be like without opt-outs? Yes, the influence of NFL money rears its ugly head again. Players don’t want to hurt they asses in a meaningless college game because it might reduce their future paychecks. So, playing for your school is not really playing for your school. You’re playing NFL futures and Bowl games may be fun, but this is business. It’s about money, and it sucks, but it has gone too far to change at this point. Now coaches are talking about putting the squeeze on college athletic departments to divert more of their revenue to players. So, all pretenses of college football being amateur athletics evaporated long ago. Total bullshit, I might add, but let me reel in this tangential nocturnal emission.

Just Peachy!

Two tackles named Cedric plus two tight ends with unpronounceable names will enter the transfer portal and are thusly out of the game for Ole Miss and its offensive line. In all, twelve Ole Miss players are headed down the pneumatic tube of the transfer portal. Where they will land, no one knows. Another issue might be the backup QB situation because second-stringer Spencer Sanders flunked out. They better hope that Dart more closely resembles the feathered flying object of the same name than Artificially Sweetened’s old Dodge Dart, which broke down on the Eisenhower Expressway.

Defensively, yet another blow to a defense that already blows came in the form of the opt-out by studly edge rusher Cedric Johnson, who articulately declared, “I optin’ out.” Johnson had 19 sacks and 22 TFLs in his time in Oxford. (The one in Mississippi, that is. At Oxford in England, they don’t say, “I optin’ out.”). Penn State QB Drew Allar, who won’t have the protection of All-Everything Left Tackle and Big Ten Lineman of the Year Olu Fashanu, must be feeling relieved. His receivers characteristically cannot get themselves open, so ol’ Drew becomes a sitting duck back there in the collapsing pocket. Let’s move along.

OMG OMG Silas Redd Revenge!!!

Much a-doo-doo has been made of the coaching matchup, which pits two peaches against each other. Will it be the pits? Some of our colleagues hope so, as they attempt to fan the long-extinguished flames of the Silas Redd Affair (not related to the Thomas Crown Affair).

Grudge-holders continue to revile current Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin owing to his part in the Silas Redd fiasco. What, you don’t remember? Good for you! It’s trivia from the past. Back when Kiffen was the head coach for USC, he “poached” running back Silas Redd from Penn State in the wake of the Sandusky Scandal. Turns out that Redd wasn’t all that, but he and Kiffen were just doing what was best for themselves and their team. What did Penn State fans want, undying loyalty when the chips were down for the team and sanctions were in place? Later, the bullshit transfer portal came along, so “poaching” became legal. So, who cares?

Does anyone care about Redd now? He was signed as a UFA by the Washington Redskins in 2014, but never did anything. Injuries and violations of the NFL substance-abuse policy ended his career. After that, he played professional rugby in Australia, but never amounted to anything. So again, who cares?

The Fast Lane

Kiffen is the son of longtime NFL defensive genius Monte Kiffen, who invented the Tampa Two defense. Although he sucked as a player for Fresno State, his dad wouldn’t let him quit the team for lack of playing time. So, he bacame a coach instead. Since then, Kiffen Jr. has gone far, moving up quickly despite his youthful age, through coaching stints in the NCAA and NFL. His current contract at Ole Miss is worth $21 million.

So, no, I don’t think anyone gives a damn about Silas Redd anymore. I mentioned it only because I want to evoke visceral reactions from other bloggers who still want to nail Kiffen to a cross. That shit is fun to watch!

Distinguished Alumnus

Ole Miss has produced many famous and infamous people. I could mention James Meredith, Archie Manning, Kate Jackson, or William Faulkner. No one would argue about their worthiness to be covered in this vignette. However, with the game being played in Atlanta, one Atlanta-born Mississippi grad stands out as an overachiever. Our Distinguished Alumnus is Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (2227-2364), who became chief medical officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and later, Starfleet admiral.

Born in Atlanta in 2227, McCoy attended the University of Mississippi. No one is certain whether this was his undergraduate or graduate alma mater. Divorced from his first wife and seeking adventure, McCoy became chief medical officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise in 2266. His nickname “Bones” allegedly arose out of a conversation with Captain James T. Kirk, when McCoy described his divorce settlement: “All I have left is my bones!”, although “Bones” had been a well-worn nickname for surgeons even back in the 19th Century. The moniker staged a comeback around the start of the 23rd Century; therefore, I submit that Kirk’s explanation is complete bullshit.

McCoy was a xenophobe and a technophobe. He disliked and distrusted Spock, who was Vulcan by heritage. “God knows, you can’t trust a Vulcan, Jim.” Due to his technophobia, he would not use the transporter unless someone held a phaser to his head. Tough to get around on a bicycle in deep space in the 2270s!

Good to know that Ole Miss was still around in the 2240s.

How did McCoy die? The record shows that he died of natural causes or by eating too many peach pits, in 2364 at the ripe old age of 137. His tombstone, fabricated from dilithium crystals, bears the simple inscription, “He’s dead, Jim.”

Da Wedda

Who cares? It’s indoors. That having been said, just for the hell of it and for those of you who will be driving to Atlanta (and back), AccuWeather says it will be 43 and rainy at gametime, which is noon (shitty). Could be equally shitty driving — especially in Atlanta.

Da Bottom Line

The last Official Turkey Poop Prediction follows. What is it, you ask? It is our unseemly, weekly, prognostication straight from the giblets of The Nittany Turkey. We’ll be playing another nooner — no respect from the schedulers — which means another sluggish start for the PSU awfense.

Unlike most bloggers and some serious sportswriters, we at The Nittany Turkey recognize the existence of the future tense, and we use it liberally in our prose. Why? Because things that will happen in the future are not happening now. Get it? We differentiate between the present and the future with the facilities provided by the English language. So, the sentence, “In the Peach Bowl, Penn State wins if it scores twenty-seven points.”, is bullshit. You’ll never see garbage-mouth crap like that here unless we’re ridiculing the idiots who write that way. Why is the auxiliary verb “will” so hard to write? Are you a bunch of willophobes?

Around here, we also pepper our prose with liberal sprinklings of the very descriptive Anglo-Saxon compound word “bullshit”, which serves us well as a noun, a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. Therefore, we are icons of grammatical purity.

Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave. He’s dead, Jim. Choked on a peach pit.

OK, so I’m shoveling out my final dose of bullshit for the year and I’m going overboard. So, sue me! I just don’t want to end this!

The bookies are looking at a close one here, giving Penn State the edge by 3.5, with an over/under of 48.5. Well, I picked PSU in Todd Sponsler’s pool, so I better stick to my guns. Penn State 27, Ole Miss 20. Take the _under. (That makes you an undertaker).

I’ll be back after the game for my final pseudo-analysis/commentary of the year unless I get some other bug up my ass. Stay tuned.