One week from now the coveted Western PA prospect will sign with the Nittany Lions…but figuring out his ‘forever home’ between the white lines remains up in the air.

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Quinton Martin — the Commonwealth’s top-rated prep prospect in the 2023-24 recruiting cycle — spurned (among others) Ohio State and Michigan when he verbally committed to Penn State way back in April. Beyond the obvious benefit of landing a promising four-star athlete, Martin’s pledge to the Nittany Lions marked another notch in James Franklin’s “Dominate The State” bedpost as Pennsylvania’s top-ranked high school football talent picked the blue and white for the third year in a row.

Sidenote: Pitt (a quick 40-minute drive from Martin’s high school) was one of the “among others” not worth mentioning, by the way.

As a junior at Belle Vernon High School, Martin was a do-it-all, Groundskeeper-Willie-One-Man-Band for the (googles Belle Vernon’s team name) Leopards, responsible for 31 of his team’s 70 total TDs (22 rushing, 6 receiving, 2 punt return, 1 INT return). The 6-foot-2, 205-pound Swiss Army knife showed off his versatility in last year’s WPIAL finals at Acrisure Stadium, treating the yinzers to a sampler platter of scores (receiving, rushing, punt return). This past Saturday, he led Belle Vernon to its second consecutive state title with 157 yards on just 13 touches.

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Philosophy

Something Old: Other than posing with dogs in social media promotional posts, departed Michigan State head coach Mel Tucker’s whole thing was being “multiple.” By that, we mean he didn’t want to give defenses hints on how to handle his squad by conforming to an established offensive identity. Instead, Tucker’s Spartans amalgamated the concepts that fit best with their personnel from various schools of offensive thought. He wanted to make prepping for Michigan State feel like taking a class with eight different textbooks.

Your scheme is largely shaped by the archetype of players you’ve spent the past half-decade recruiting — or maybe that’s a “chicken and the egg” scenario. Firing a coach in-season doesn’t reinvent your team’s identity, although I’d say they’ve stripped the majority of the offense down to the classic “spread-option.”

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Raise a toast, or pour one out, for the end of an era.

This Friday’s climate-controlled tussle for “A giant, rectangular piece of wood with some stuff on it,” marks the 23^rd time – and potentially final time — that the manufactured Penn State-Michigan State rivalry will punctuate the regular season for both programs.

While this series has arguably been the most unpredictable, unsettling, and downright wacky of any since the Nittany Lions pushed the Big Ten to 11 in 1993, this season’s Spartans appear to be a soft, checked-out opponent to finish strong against and bank some last-minute style points…style points that should lock down a NY6 invitation to hang with the Chick-fil-A cows in Atlanta or the dancing VRBO Excessive Cleaning Fees (just a bunch of guys wearing wine-stained carpet mascot outfits) in Glendale, Arizona.

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After five drama-filled, tumultuous, ‘Behind The Music’ years, apart Mike Locksley and Josh Gattis finally decided to get the band back together!

Flashback to 2018. The setting: Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Tua Tagovailoa is the quarterback for the Crimson Tide, Najee Harris is their third-best running back, DeVonta Smith is their fifth receiver and they have five different defenders with double-digit TFL — one of whom is named Quinnen Williams. That’s, like, a lot of talent on one roster — enough talent to (checks Wikipedia) lose by 4 touchdowns in the national title game to then-ACC bully Clemson?!? Hmm.

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Way back in the day when I was a bright-eyed undergrad at a little school in State College, I got into the terrible habit of waiting until the last second to start projects…a procrastinator, as it’s commonly known.

Thankfully, it only took three Testing Hall panic attacks (third time’s the charm!) to crystalize the lesson my mom spent 17 years trying to drill into my brain: Work, THEN play.

While that advice eventually ushered me across the stage and got me this swell piece of paper with my name on it, turns out Mom was dead wrong…at least when it came to scouting this Jekyll-and-Hyde, Sweet-Then-Sour, Caterpillar-Turned-Butterfly-But-In-Reverse Maryland football team.

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Pat Fitzgerald grew up in Orland Park, a suburb just south of Chicago. He was an All-American middle linebacker at Northwestern in the high-shoulder pad era of the  mid-1990s, a tackle-to-tackle prowler who put a pair of Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year trophies in the Wildcats sparsely filled case. After his eligibility expired, he spent more than two decades coaching at his Alma Mater, 17 as the head coach. Jack Fitzgerald, Pat’s son, was about to start his freshman year playing TE for his proud papa.

All of this sounds like the first act of a movie, including the fact that Pat looks like Tony Soprano doing pretty well on his diet. Unfortunately, the fairytale story ended prematurely and without a happy ending.

Rumors of systemic hazing  bubbled over into full-blown allegations over the summer. Lawsuits from multiple parties are still pending but the school couldn’t afford to wait; Fitzgerald was fired in July, less than a month before the start of preseason practice, following the university’s investigation into the matter. It wasn’t quite losing a JoePa, but Fitzgerald was undisputedly the face of the Northwestern program.

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I’m not one of these sports savants who can describe in perfect detail a specific play from a Week Twelve game against Pitt in the mid-80’s. By the end of each football season, I pretty much delete those files from my human hard drive (a.k.a. my brain) to clear room for all of the day-to-day trivial gigabytes – passwords, family birthdays, answers to security questions like the middle name of my second-grade gym teacher – to survive from late January to late August.

There is one exception, though…weird weather games.

Not sure what it is, but there’s something about players flopping around in extreme rain, snow, wind, that just stinks in my memory. Heck, 60 years from now, when my no-good unborn children stick me in a senior assisted living facility (or God’s Waiting Room, as it’s also called) I’ll still be muttering about the 2007 Steelers-Dolphins Monday Night Mud Bowl and the Brandon Fields punt submerged in the slop…well, when I’m not screaming about the nurses stealing money.

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