Penn State 45, Minnesota 17

No one was throwing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the White Out on Saturday night. Instead, they were chugging the newly authorized Beaver Stadium beer and having a gay old time. (Can we still say “gay” to mean the old, non-co-opted definition of the word?) The Nittany Lions won many of the Franklinesque, so-called battles, warming the collective hearts of the Nittany Nation and temporarily eradicating memories of the Debacle at Ann Arbor.

One from Column A, One from Column B – No Egg Loll

With a freshman replacement quarterback subbing for the highly experienced but injured Tanner Morgan, Minnesota was fresh gopher meat for the Penn State defense, which concentrated on stopping all-universe rushing threat Mo Ibrahim (for some reason, pronounced as a non-Arabic EYE-bra-him). Mo still managed to get 100+ yards and a touchdown, but his average was 3.4 yards per carry and his longest was only thirteen yards. Freshman quarterback Athan the Greek (from Williamsport, PA) was off the mark much of the day, going 9-22 for 175 yards with one touchdown and one interception.

Meanwhile, the Penn State offense was present, too. The running game was working against Minnesota’s formerly well-regarded defense. Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen shared much of the load, with 79 and 77 yards, respectively. Singleton had two touchdown runs. Sean Clifford had an excellent day, returning from his injury in the Debacle at Ann Arbor (cue heraldic trumpets), 22-31 for 295 yards, with four touchdowns and an interception. The offense conspired to convert five of eleven third-down opportunities, which is much better than their putrid average. Plus, they converted one fourth down, albeit in a low-pressure situation.

Defensively, linebacker Curtis Jacobs was this week’s standout, with fourteen tackles, seven of which were solo and two TFLs. And special teams had a good day, too, on both sides of the ball.

Big shout-out to the 109,000+ White Out fans, whose noise created several of the Gophers’ eight penalties.

Where from Here?

So, this will surely give the Sanguinarians® a false sense of security going into the big showdown with #2 Ohio State on Saturday.

What, then, do we think of this team, who last week was better at throwing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at their opponents at halftime than they were on the field? At this point, going into another potential debacle, which few see any chance of winning, a logical mind would conclude that they are going to panic and fold again next Saturday. Seems like they can manhandle inferior competition, although sometimes they get overconfident and distracted, such as in the Northwestern game. Will they fold their tent again against Ohio State?

Stay tuned…

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I’ll be back mid-week with a cynical overview of the Battle for the Big Ten East.

Auric Rodents* (4-2, 1-2) vs. Penn State (5-1, 2-1)

Sciarocca vs. Yurcich in the Battle of Offensive Offenses

Can we say “white out” anymore without offending someone or adding the term “privilege”? Regardless, the annual game implementing the idea germinated by Guido d’Elia, deposed strategic Culture of Football marketing guru of the Paterno era, is here upon us. The Minnesota Golden Gophers invade State College on Saturday evening to face the freshly defeated gladiators of now #16 Penn State.

Why should “almost famous” Minnesota be thus honored? According to James Franklin, who always has something to say about nothing and never has anything to say about something, it was the game’s starting time that inspired the decision. I have something more to say about that. Had PSU beaten Michigan, the tOSU game a week hence would have been played in prime time and would have been a more intuitively logical choice for the White-Out. My conjecture is that before the season started, the Culture of Football Geniuses at Penn State had already figured that Michigan would be a loss and we’d be relegated to the noon time slot for the forthcoming loss to the Buckeyes. Thus, Minnesota got the nod.

Can History Repeat Itself?

If you look back through the annals of Penn State football history, you’ll find that the Minnesota game is often pivotal. For example, the 24-23 loss in 1999 by the then 9-0 Nittany Lions heralded the beginning of a slide into a form of purgatory known among PSU fans as THE DARK YEARS. (Cue ominous, minor key cello riff). Likewise, the Lions thought they were hot shit twenty years later, in 2019, when they were 8-0 going into the tilt with the Gophers. That year, they lost 31-26. The only other loss as the 2019 season proceeded was to Ohio State, so you could say that the Minnesota loss dashed any playoff hopes for the Nittany Lions. This year, the Penn State record is 5-1, and coming off a huge, embarrassing massacre by the winged weasels, a loss here could portend yet another slide to oblivion.

Fortunately, these teams don’t play each other every year. Who could stand the excitement, already?!

Talkin’ Shit…

If the trash talking bullshit in the Michigan tunnel is any indication, this group of Nittany Lions is already fragile. Trash talking when you’re getting your ass kicked reminds me of Anthony Morelli standing on the bench taunting Michigan fans in 2005, in a game Penn State lost. Bad form, to say the least. Now, PSU head coach James Franklin feels that the simple remedy for the trash talking problem is to impose a new rule temporally staggering the field exits at halftime when opponents share the tunnel to the locker room.

Such bullshit?! That’s like saying let’s avoid marital strife by living on opposite coasts, Hollywood style. Works for them, I suppose. But no, Franklin is in de Nile, like dem beeg crocodiles. Hey Franklin, how about controlling your team and imposing some discipline on the guilty parties instead of promoting misbehavior by externalizing the problem? Proximity ain’t the cause — it’s assholes acting like assholes. We mold men at Penn State, not overblown, braggadocious boys. Success with honor, Franklin! Set these guys back for fucking up, will you? Screw the suggestions that we need rules about who can go into the tunnel at what time!

At the very least, they must learn the lesson that they should put their money where their mouths are.

But I digress…

Recent Outings

Hell no, we’re not going to talk much about the PSU-Michigan game, which will be indelibly branded in your personal Hall of Shame for time immemorial. The stats were so lopsided that at one time, Penn State had two lucky touchdowns and only one first down. And the defense flat-out suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked!

Moving on to Minnesota, the 4-2 Gophers are coming off a shitty 26-14 loss to the 2022 upstart Indigenously Pugilistic Illiniweks, now ranked #18 and rising under the adept tutelage of former pig farmer Brett Bulimia Bielema. The Natives thoroughly dominated the Rodents, ringing up 472 yards to Minnesota’s 180 and dominating the increasingly irrelevant time of possession (IITOP), 40-20. To compound the felony, the Burrowers threw three ugly interceptions. The Illinois game is surely one that Rodent fans would rather forget, but like Penn State’s abysmal loss last week, it will live on in their personal Hall of Shame forever.

So, both had shitty games last week.

Whoda QB?

Questions exist for both teams regarding who the signal callers will be when the Heap Big White-Privilege-Out game starts at 7:30 pm on Saturday. Minnesota sixth-year senior QB Tanner Morgan was punched in the head by a Fighting (literally) Illini freshman linebacker in the loss to Illinois and hasn’t been quite right ever since. However, as I write this, he has not been ruled out for the Penn State game. Meanwhile, our own sixth-year boy, Sean Clifford, is being evaluated for an undisclosed injury suffered in the horrible loss to Michigan. Franklin refuses to talk about injuries unless they’re season-ending, so I guess there’s hope for Clifford, because Franklin ain’t sayin’ shit!

Redshirt freshman Athan Kaliakmanis might get the nod if Morgan cannot start. Meanwhile, fickle PSU fans have been champing at the bit to get freshman sensation Drew Allar some playing time. This could be their wet dream, but then the honeymoon wouldn’t last awfully long because the problems of the Penn State offense run much deeper than who plays quarterback. Lotta fixing needs to be done there for whoever lines up behind the always questionable offensive line.

Morgan is the Gophers’ winningest quarterback in program history, with thirty-one victories, and he has thrown for 1164 yards and seven touchdowns this year. Without him, the Rodents might be screwed.

Da Wedda

Da weddaperson calls for a mostly sunny day with light winds, a high of 67 and a low of 38. Good football weather, but it might get a little chilly before the night is over. Let us hope that just refers to the weather.

Da Bottom Line

Time for the Official Turkey Poop Prognostication, as we all scratch our heads wondering which version of a football team will show up for Penn State. Will the Michigan loss throw a wet blanket on the season, to be exacerbated by a loss to Minnesota and a slide to oblivion? In my mind, that slide started with Northwestern, regardless of the win. Or will the team heed the words of the great sage PJ Mustipher who made the pronouncement, “We can’t let a loss create another loss.”? Will Betelgeuse explode and take us with it? These are questions that deserve answers that even I, the lesser great sage, cannot provide. You must wait and see.

The oddsmakers favor the Nittany Lions by merely 4.5 points at home. This is like the usual home advantage of a field goal plus a point-and-a-half for good measure. Hmmm, the Sanguinarians®, undaunted in the wake of the Michigan Massacre at Da Big House, must think that is a huge overlay. They’ll go all in on this one, needing to give up only 4.5 points. Hell, bet the house on it, for last week was an anomaly. No way this team could lose two in a row. Or could they?

I’m here to make a cold-blooded prediction, not to sing praises of nonexistent heroes, so here goes. The over/under is 44.5, so that says the gamblers are looking at a Penn State win of like 24.5 – 20. Can they figure out a way to score half a point? Franklin would have an answer for that. But their problems run deep, so these trash talkers lack the team character to avert post-massacre doldrums. Taking no credit away from Michigan’s complete domination, they just looked TOO BAD last week. Minnesota 24, Penn State 23 and it’s déjà vu all over again, 1999 style. (Cue Prince singing about partying). Take the over.

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*Credit Big Al for the catchy Minnesota moniker.

I’ll return after the White-Privilege-Out to recap, excoriate, and castigate.

Michigan 41, Penn State 17

James Franklin had two weeks to prepare for what he knew would be a tough one, but in the end, he lived up to his abysmal road record in big games and his crappy performance following bye weeks. The game was in no way as close as is suggested by the lopsided score dutifully, albeit heartbreakingly, reported above.

Told You So

I won’t bore you with the embarrassing stats, which have already been rubbed in painfully many times over. I’ll just say I told you so. Between K. John and me, we both told you so. He got the 41; I got the 17. Two teams claimed to be Top Ten teams going into this game. Michigan might be a top ten team, but Penn State sure as hell isn’t. Never were. Shows you what early season polls are worth: bupkis!

Why was it such a big surprise that Penn State running backs couldn’t get out of the backfield? Every half-assed fan expected to see Michigan stacking the box and quenching the run. What had been easy yards against the likes of Ohio U would evaporate in a miasma of frustration on the field in da Big House on Saturday. Adding insult to injury, or worse, adding insult to insult, the vaunted Penn State defense gave up well over 500 yards, succumbing to the relentless pounding by the Wolverine offensive line and two talented running backs. Donovan Edwards had sixteen carries for 173 yards and two touchdowns; Blake Corum had 28 carries for 166 yards and two touchdowns.

Lucky Points

The Nittany Lions got lucky in the first half, improbably scoring two touchdowns while being thoroughly dominated, getting their asses kicked up and down the field on both sides of the ball. The first trip to paydirt resulted from a superb 62-yard run by our leading rusher, Sean Clifford on a well-executed play fake. Yea, verily, the Master of Explosive Plays, James G. Franklin, was in his glory for a picosecond. The second touchdown was on a flukey pick-six, where the tipped ball bounced in the air in slow-motion long enough for Curtis Jacobs to grab it and run 47 yards to da house to take an improbable 14-13 lead in front of a stunned 110,000 maized-out UM fans. At that point, late in the second quarter, the Nittany Lions had more touchdowns than first downs.

The Wolverines added a field goal just before the halftime gun just so’s they’d have a 16-14 lead going into the locker room. It would be all Michigan after that.

UnPennStatesmanlike Conduct

Speaking of the tunnel to the locker room, what the hell is this bullshit about the lack of decorum while Penn State players were running off the field alongside their Michigan counterparts? Reports I read say the argument had started because of some social media trash-talking by Penn State players. Why the hell was this Miami Hurricanes style behavior tolerated by the coaching staff? WE ARE Penn State, remember? Trash talking ain’t our thing. We keep our mouths shut and prove ourselves on the field.

Unless we can’t. This bush league behavior is the stuff of pretenders. It’s put up or shut up, and Penn State didn’t put up so STFU!

The pre-halftime bullshit no doubt impelled Michigan to want to kick some serious ass in the second half. They did, and the bedraggled Nittany Lions did not have the wherewithal to respond with anything more than one feeble, early third period field goal. Then, nothing…

Whither Goeth the Season?

Am I being too harsh? Am I writing off the entire season after one ignominious defeat? Am I being premature? Remember St. Joe’s conciliatory words: “You’re never as good as you think you are when you win, and you’re never as bad as you think you are when you lose.” This one stings, but what stings worse is an in-yo-face attitude when it turns out to be all show and no blow.

In the wake of the sloppy Northwestern game, lifelong friend Toejam opined that PSU would lose the rest of its 2022 games. I consoled him with the aforementioned Paterno maxim. However, now, after two horrible games sandwiching a bye week, I’m more likely than not to agree with his frustrated assessment. This time, when he opined that the remainder of the season would be a repeat of last year, I meekly retorted, “We might be able to beat Rutgers.”

IITOP? Not So Much

And Matt Herb, this is for YOU: Time of Possession is not increasingly irrelevant when it signifies that your offense cannot give the defense a blow. The PSU defense was on the field for almost forty-two minutes. If they were hoping for explosive plays to save they ass, they got one — just one — Clifford’s 62-yard run. Take that out of the rushing total and you have a measly 49 yards on 21 attempts: 2.3 yards per carry. But I digress. The Nittany Lions’ defense was on the field way too much and they were pounded into submission by the Wolverines.

So, I’m disgusted. It is not bad enough that they got blown out, but they had to do that trash-talking thing when they had no chance of putting their money where their mouth was. Pretenders and their bravado! BullSHIT! Whoda thought it would come to that at Penn State.

The pretenders will drop significantly in this weeks polls, but probably not as much as they should. Contrary to what the perennially whining, platitude-spouting Sanguinarians think, PSU usually gets more respect from the media than it deserves, not less. Just how in the hell could the team that was on the field for the past two games ever garner a #10 ranking unless that were so!

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I’ll be back midweek for a look at what Big Al called the auric rodents. I kinda like that. Cleverly turned phrases are what I have for amusement while Franklin pays lip service to going 1-0 this week.