Archives for October 2006

Cory Giger of The Altoona Mirror has reported that PSU left offensive tackle Levi Brown underwent arthroscopy of his knee after injuring it in the practices leading up to the Northwestern game. This fact had been kept under wraps by the Athletic Department and Brown. ?????? ????????? Read it here.

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN, October 28 — The Turkey’s attention span just wasn’t broad enough to stay involved in this boring game, but Ol’ Birdbrain forced himself to watch it so that he would have something to say here. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Huh? Oh, yeah. The Score! Penn State (6–3, 4–2 Big Ten) won it 12–0 over Purdue (5–4, 2–3 Big Ten). And the Turkey’s prediction was incorrect—way incorrect! The Turkey was setting his sights low, so he wouldn’t be disappointed.

(To refresh your memory, the prediction was Purdue 27, Penn State 17.)

My prognostication gave Purdue much too much credit for its offense, which prior to this game was #8 in the nation and #1 in the Big Ten. In reality, the Boilermakers haven’t played all that well against good defenses. Last week, squaring off with Wisconsin, they were able to score just three points. This week they got the big goose egg for the first time since 1996. It was also the first shutout pitched by the Nittany Lions since they beat Northwestern in 2002. Inexplicably, I also gave our offense too much credit, thinking that they could surely score 17 against Purdue’s porous defense. They wound up turning in their usual half-assed performance.

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The following exchange is from Ray Fittipaldo’s Q&A in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today:

TonyO: Cheer up Ray. JoePa HAS to retire one of these years. Then we won’t have to put up with this crap!

Ray Fittipaldo: It looks like they’re going to make him hang it up after next year, the final year of his contract, whether he wants to go or not. At least that’s the word from people around the program. I’ll believe it when I see it. I still think he coaches until he’s 100.

This Turkey agrees with Fittipaldo. “People around the program” are having a big pipe dream, if not collective dissociative disorder, if they think that the administration can convince Paterno, who apparently runs the university, to hang up the spikes. Past performance evidenced by the 2004 peri-Thanksgiving visit to Paterno’s house by Spanier and Curley suggests that the most the administration will be able to do is recommend that Joe not ask for a contract renewal, after which they’ll be shown the door and told to be good boys and behave while Dad goes on about his business.

Joe will leave when he is ready to leave.