The Nittany Turkey

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

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Home 2008 Archives for September 2008

Archives for September 2008

Logjam in Beaverville

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So, I have a bellyache and my creative title generator isn’t working too well. Thus, “Logjam in Beaverville” was the best I could muster. It sucks, I know, but I’m amusing myself, which is the stated purpose of this blog. In any event, the title refers to the total domination of the Oregon State Beavers by the #19 Penn State Nittany Lions on Saturday last. The final score was 45-14, and to use my oft-abused hack sports writer cliche, it wuddn’t that close.

Evan Royster had a career day, running for 141 yards on 17 carries and three TDs. Daryll Clark looked sharp, too, going 14-23 for 215 yards and two TDs and no INTs. Clark also ran the ball five times for 61 yards, looking much like Michael Robinson in 2005. In all, the Nittany Lions rung up 454 all-purpose yards. On the strength of this performance, the Lions rose to #17 in the AP Poll.

Jordan Norwood reeled in eight passes, which moved him past O. J. McDuffie on Penn State’s all-time list.

Josh Hull and Mark Rubin both had interceptions and both were career firsts.

The game started with a flubbed kickoff by Kevin Kelly, which put the Beavers on the 40 yard-line. Fortunately, it was his last awful kick of the day. After Oregon State couldn’t move the ball, they kicked and in so doing returned the favor with a shanked, 18-yard punt.

Oregon State’s running game stayed grounded against the depleted Penn State front four, which would become more depleted as the day progressed. Still, star rusher Jacquizz Rogers mustered 91 yards and two touchdowns.

The Nittany Lions ran at will against what was last year’s #1 rush defense. However, the Beavers had to replace the entire front seven, so the defense did not resemble what they had on the field last year.

Penn State lost the ball only once, a heartbreaker for Evan Royster as he fumbled close to the goal line. Otherwise, the Lions were perfect.

Close to perfect, that is. Alas, they were not perfect on the injury front, losing Jerome Hayes for the season with a torn ACL in his right knee on a punt return in the fourth quarter. Hayes just returned from rehabbing his left knee, which was injured last season.

We TV viewing fans did not get to witness the Hayes injury, as ABC decided to cut away in the fourth quarter to the Oklahoma game, which also wound up not close. I expressed my discontent over this travesty of TV coverage in a prior post.

So, was this the Spread HD? I think we saw some of what it has to offer. Joe and Jay seemed to open it up a bit after the Coastal Carolina game. There was a big difference in one area—using Daryll Clark in the running game.

What was Jay Paterno doing down in the coaches’ huddle on the sideline close to the end of the first half? In the second half, the camera found him in his usual position upstairs in the booth.

We promised you a guest reporter, and you will have a guest reporter. You’ll recall that Sacajawea, a Shoshone, was one of the first and foremost Oregonians. She was an indispensable helper for Lewis & Clark in their search for the Northwest Passage. Sacajawea spoke English, French, and Shoshone and she wore cool looking buckskin dresses. Clark affectionately named her “Janey.”

Sacajawea was said to have died in 1812, but then a woman died in 1884 in Wyoming who many people believed was the real Sacajawea. Well, we probed a bit and found the elderly Janey actually still living amongst the Seminoles at the Micosukee Reservation behind the casino in Hollywood, Florida. In such situations, contact an attorney who will help you in understanding estate planning legal documents and are compassionate to help you out. She is getting a little old, slightly over 220, but she still sparkles with the determination and humor that got her through those many thousands of miles with the Lewis & Clark expedition and made her an icon for the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the early 20th century. She gave us some Sacajawea dollars as souvenirs of our visit.

Janey’s sense of humor is evident in her report. This Turkey asked her what she thought of her fellow Oregonians’ first 18-yard punt, and she replied with the following, which I’ve printed in red. We thought the modern day National Organization for Women (NOW) might particularly like it.

Punts? You want to hear about punts? Oy, I’ll give you already a story about punts!

It was the cold winter of 1804 and I was in the service of Meri and Bill on the Oregon Trail. Being fluent in English, French, and Shoshone, I was tasked with carrying a note containing the supply order to M. Carbonneau’s trading post, many miles away. All those languages—so confusing at times for a Shoshone girl. The order said, “Please have three punts and a canoe ready for us on Tuesday.”

Unfortunately, along the way, a beaver ate the note and I had to hastily scrawl out a copy of the order when I got to my destination. As nightfall was nigh, I quickly dropped off the rewritten order and beat a hasty path back to the boys’ camp. I had a close encounter with a bear, but I was able to rejoin the party, which left the next day for the trading post.

Upon our reaching the trading post the proprietor greeted Lewis & Clark. “Welcome, Lewis and Clark! I was pleased to receive your order, but there is one problem, mes amis. I got you the girls, but what the hell is a ‘panoe’?”

Um, thank you, Janey.

This Turkey will be back with a hopefully relevant write up about the Syracuse game later in the week, possibly, maybe.

Perhaps.

Heidi Revisited?

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Forty years have elapsed since the infamous “Heidi Game,” which means that most of you readers will have absolutely no clue as to what I am talking about. The game, played on November 17, 1968, was an important AFL match up between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, with both teams being at the peak of their all-time popularity and both sporting a 7-2 record for the season. It was a smash-mouth battle involving the two great arms of the time as the opposing quarterbacks, Joe Namath and Darryl Lamonica. As the exciting game ground to completion, with 65 seconds left in the game, the Jets led the defending champion Raiders 32-29.

NBC was broadcasting the game nationwide, and thought the game was decided. They had scheduled a broadcast of the children’s story Heidi at that time, so they pulled the plug on the football game, evoking justifiable ire and outrage among the viewing audience. Even if no more scoring was to take place, the fans deserved to see the end of the game, but there was more scoring. Lots more. In one of the greatest comebacks in professional football history, the Raiders scored 14 points in the final 65 seconds, winning the game 43-32. America suddenly had a new enemy, and it wasn’t the North Vietnamese—it was NBC.

The ensuing furious response actually broke the NBC switchboard the next morning.

What the hell does this have to do with anything in 2008? Well, we have a new enemy, and it is not Al Qaeda—it is ESPN/ABC.

The Disney-owned entertainment conglomerate chose to cut away from the Penn State-Oregon State game with practically a whole quarter remaining. Penn State was leading 45-7 at the time. Sure, it seemed like the Nittany Lions had the game well in hand, but being Penn State fans, we wanted to see Pat Devlin and some of the clean jerseys in action. From ABC’s perspective, it was a blowout, it was the primary national game on ABC for most of the country, and no doubt a lot of advertising revenue was at stake if viewers tuned out. In the Turkey’s Cave, we scrambled, looking around the satellite channels and not finding anything. There ensued a mad dash to get computers set up to listen to Steve Smith and Jack Ham doing the radio broadcast, which took a while and was distracting as hell. By that time it was 45-14, which would turn out to be the final score. We completely missed Jerome Hayes’ injury, which we had to read about in the morning news.

I can only imagine that the various viewing parties around the country were scenes of bemused chaos. ABC/ESPN protected their revenue, but what about people who walked out of bars around the country an hour or so earlier than they would have if the game were carried to completion? Doesn’t Disney have some responsibility to those small businesses and to the ordinary viewer? Or is it all about commercial revenue?

Ganja Three: Evidence Seized

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The Centre Daily Times has published the University Police’s list of items confiscated from the apartment of Maurice Evans, Abe Koroma, Andrew “Substance” Quarless, and AJ Wallace, to wit:

  • 5 roaches (marijuana cigarette butts)
  • 3 samples of suspected marijuana
  • an expired Pennsylvania learner’s permit
  • a bag of marijuana with an empty cigar from a trash can
  • mixed pills outside a trash can
  • a can containing a marijuana roach
  • bagging containing marijuana
  • a bag of marijuana in a trash can
  • ripped bagging from a trash can
  • a Penn State ID card

Apparently, these guys are so stupid that they don’t know how to use a toilet to flush the evidence.

By the way, Wallace was exonerated by Joe Paterno, which must mean that the cops told Joe that Wallace was not a party of interest. Now, I’m hearing that Quarless will dress for the game Saturday (that doesn’t mean he’ll play).

Paterno was so pissed off at them that he reportedly broke his watch slamming his fist down on the table at the team meeting Wednesday. Apparently, histrionics such as this are not working. Players continue to breech team rules and exhibit poor judgment, no matter how much ranting and raving Joe does. Paterno has lost it in every sense of the word.

Nothing Joe has done has served to curtail the lack of discipline among a certain element of this team. Dismissing Bell, Harriott, Hayes, Scott, and Taylor didn’t do it. Scirrotto’s inconsequential suspension didn’t do it. The ridiculous punish assignment meted out by Joe last year—the Sunday cleaning of Beaver Stadium after home games—didn’t do it. (In fact, initially that last one was to have gone on for the entire season, but Paterno curtailed it because he thought they learned their lesson. They obviously didn’t.)

So, why does Joe think that suspending these clowns is going to accomplish anything?

You know the answer to that question.

I am beginning to think that the ESPN Outside the Lines piece was more substance than smear, more red meat than red herring.

This particularly sucks because one of the team’s best players, Maurice Evans, is involved. I’m not saying this from a fan’s perspective. I personally don’t give a shit if this team loses the rest of their games this year, as long as they clean up their act. You would think that guys like Maurice Evans, who was on his way to a big, fat NFL paycheck, would think twice, if only in self-interest, before doing crazy shit like this. The “character flag” in NFL scouting reports guarantees a lower draft position, which means a lower salary, and it could cause many NFL organizations to look the other way. Evans is cutting off his nose to spite his face. He’s not even smart enough to look out for his own interest, let alone that of his team. Asshole.

It’s not just a pot party. It’s an “in yo’ face” pot party that violated team rules a night before practice on the second week of the season. If it had happened during the winter, I might have been inclined to look the other way. But, hell no, not during the season.

The team has a few captains. Where are they? Naming Scirrotto as a co-captain is kind of comical—leading by example? Sean Lee is kind of soft spoken. A.Q. Shipley could rattle a few cages.

I ask once again: When will the captains have a players-only meeting to take charge of this team?

It has to happen. Clearly, the coaches have lost it.