SMU (11-2) vs. Penn State (11-2)
Frigid temperatures and a dusting of snow will greet the Mustangs from warmer climes on Saturday for a noon showdown with the Nittany Lions at Beaver Stadium in a first-round CFP matchup. To prepare, the SMU players were directed to put ice cubes in their compression undies (which I’m told replace the jock straps familiar to us baby boomers). Freezing their balls is an apt prelude to a mid-December game in Beaver Stadium. State College for Christmas is a vacation destination only an Eskimo could love.
But what about the game, Turkey? Jeez, you get lost in those digressions and you talk to yourself so much that you even write to yourself! Come on, get with it!
OK, I will. Both teams slid in the back door of the playoffs. Penn State got there after a loss to Oregon, while SMU gained its entry with a loss to Clemson. I must say that the CFP committee has done some creative things thing year, and they pissed off lots of people by leaving Alabama out. One of the sports media whiners, Joel Klatt, thinks Penn State’s path was contrived to be the easiest way to the semi-finals, with SMU in the first round, and Boise State ahead if they dispatch SMU. Wild horses, in this case Mustangs and Broncos, cannot bring down a Lion, right?
Bad News/Good News
Well, all bullshit aside, some of the big news going into this game is that Penn State will be without its primary backup quarterback and creative play option, Beau Pribula, who has opted to evacuate State College via the Obnoxious NCAA Tran$fer Portal (ONTP). The NCAA had its collective head up its ass when it decided on the deadlines for the ONTP, such that players on playoff teams who want to find jobs on other teams must miss the damn playoff games. What a piece of shit! The NCAA, I mean, not Pribula. He had little choice to use his additional year of eligibility, which he couldn’t use at Penn State. He is graduating in December.
But the good news is that concomitant with Pribula’s announcement, Drew Allar made a mitigating announcement of his own. He intends to play for Penn State in 2025. Who will be his backup is unclear at this point.
So Long, Beau. We will miss you.
Pribula brought some unique talents to the squad, which Offensive Coordinator Andy Kotelnicki used extensively in his creative offense. Pribula also was an unflappable backup, who could run the offense when needed. We will miss him. (Here, I could have said, “He will be missed.” I would never say that. What is that bullshit all about? It is typically found in vacuous eulogies or reactions to someone’s departure from an organization. Couching in the passive voice tacitly says, “While I don’t give a flying fuck about this guy, some of the rest of you might miss him.” Look, clowns, stop writing, “He will be missed.” If you miss him, say so; if you don’t, then shut your pie hole, OK? But I digress.).
Hey, by the way, where is BOWLing for Dollars this year, Todd? Have you retired from that annual delight? I miss it. (It will be missed, but I digress).
I Can’t Even…
Meanwhile, back at the game, I typically look at NCAA stats for the season to get a gauge on PSU’s opponents’ capabilities versus Penn State’s. Well, those pieces of shit at the NCAA threw me a curve this week by dumping out the season’s statistics and displaying only the post-season. Maybe I’m too stupid to find where they might have hidden the 2024 regular season, and I’m definitely too lazy to continue looking for it. The same people who designed the timetable for the ONTP apparently designed the web interface to the stats pages. Fuck ’em.
So, I’ll pull my prediction right out of my ass, like I usually do, only without any pretenses of statistical mastery of the contest or intimate knowledge of the opponents. This is what hack sports media wonks call “breaking down” SMU, or whoever they’re “breaking down”. In horse racing, “breaking down” has a different meaning, and it ain’t good. In the race chart of this game, we’ll just hope that the Mustangs break down.
Why is this a noon game?
Typically, noon games are for shit teams that won’t draw much of an audience. However, in this case, this game was one of the crumbs thrown to TNT, who is doing CFP coverage for the very first time. ABC/ESPN/Disney and CBS sure as hell weren’t going to give them Ohio State vs. Tennessee, Texas vs. Clemson, or Notre Dame vs. Indiana. So, SMU vs. Penn State got the booby prize. Yay us!
Da Wedda — WTF?
Yeah, well, you wouldn’t even need to look at a forecast to know what we’re dealing with here. And the numbers won’t do your frozen ass any good if you show up for the game. But in the interest of accurate reporting, we’ll say that the forecast we have seen here at The Turkey is a high of 29 and a low of 15. The north wind blows free (how much do you charge?), at the rate of 15 mph, so it will feel like a ball-chilling 17 degrees out there. Precipitation probability is 65%, so there will be snow showers as the pitifully impotent sun ducks into and out of cloud cover. Yea, verily, this will be a balmy December Central Pennsylvania day.
So, advantage to the Nittany Lions, who put up with that bullshit lots more than the ponies from Big D.
Da Uninformed Bottom Line
Here we come to what could be, but we hope isn’t, the last Official Turkey Poop Prognostication of the season. We know that anything emanating from the pen of this foul old fowl this week is laden with sarcasm but lacking in substance. Yet you’re still reading, so I must be doing something entertaining. That’s all I purport to be here — light on information, but heavy on the jokes. I never take myself seriously, and any resemblance between this blog and a reliable information source is purely imaginary. That leads us into my prediction for the game.
I believe the Mustangs have a potent offense, but I believe scoring will be low on both sides due to frozen balls, both of human and pigskin varieties. See, here I sit in Florida, where it is 76 currently, so I can give you a warmed over prediction. Look, at this point, the spread is PSU –8.5. The over/under is 54.5. So, applying bettor’s calculus, we’re looking at a break-even pure numbers outcome without consideration of money lines, with a score resembling 31-24 in favor of Penn State. I’m thinking cold hands, cold balls, and cold hearts will knock a field goal off each total, resulting in my prediction of Penn State 27, SMU 20. Franklin doesn’t cover the spread, but wins the game. I’m taking the under.
I’ll be back after the Glacier Bowl with some sparkling commentary from the warm and fuzzy Turkey living on that penile peninsula known as Florida.
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Big Al says
SMU is basically the Penn State of the ACC. They lost to the best two teams they played and didn’t beat a legitimate top 20 team. They rely on team speed to beat their opponents. Their defense can stop the run but is vulnerable against a good passing team. And they commit a lot of turnovers and penalties.
So, this game probably depends on which league is better. The B1G has a better reputation than the ACC but was 6-9 against Power 4 opponents and 2-3 against the ACC this year. However, all of those ACC-B1G games involved bottom feeders. None of the top B1G 10 teams played any ACC teams and vice versa. Both leagues were extremely top heavy this year and the bottom half teams in both leagues really sucked.
Since there is no reliable data showing how the top teams in the B1G compare with the top ACC teams, I’m not going to predict a winner or final score. The winner will be the team that screws up the least. My only prediction is that this will be a 3 hour and 30 minute long slop fest featuring at least 150 penalty yards, 5 turnovers, 25 incomplete passes, and a dozen injury timeouts for “cramps”. I pity anyone who pays to watch this game in person,.
K. John says
This game has a lot of things going on. Starting with Pribula. I say great job NCAA. The portal timing is the best decision they have made in years if not decades. The greed of players is beyond the pale. The age of player exploitation ended back in the 80s. Players have had it great since at least the 90s and it has gotten better for them every year at the cost of the game itself which is a shell of its former self. So, about that opening round of the National Invitational Tournament, or NIT.
It is pretty obvious we got a lot of breaks this year. We played the easiest schedule we have played since before joining the Big Ten losing the only games we played against competition. We didn’t play a single toss up. Only Indiana had an easier path the playoffs. SMU on the other hand has played the stronger schedule. Our two losses are better than their two losses but their top three wins are better than all of ours and to make matters worse, we didn’t play teams as good so we lose a valuable data point.
A lot of people are putting a lot of stock in the team’s performance against Oregon without acknowledging the fact that once Oregon realized they could move the ball at will and force us to drive the length of the field on every position, they played a very low risk game knowing we were not a real threat, and we weren’t.
Without many comparison points, I have to go with trends and the biggest one is not a good one. We have a very bad record against teams on par with this SMU squad when breaking down quality wins and losses under Franklin. How bad? We lose nearly 90% of the time. We lose nearly 80% if you include the post season as you get to add 2016 Wisconsin and 2017 Washington but also 2023 Ole Miss. This does not include a single game against Ohio State, games against Michigan’s top five teams or Oregon.
Based on this well-established trend and how poorly we looked against some really bad teams, I am going with SMU because Franklin doesn’t beat good teams very often.