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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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Contrary to the offseason narrative, Penn State senior cornerback Daequan Hardy’s 2022 numbers suggest it might not take much to return to form.

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s preseason football coverage is brought to you by Happy Valley United – the NIL collective representing every Penn State student-athlete. CLICK HERE to join the team and pledge your support.

After punctuating a pleasantly-surprising junior campaign with a cinematic pick-6 at Michigan State, piercing the sheets of snowflakes in his road all-whites as the blizzard raged on, it was expected Daequan Hardy would take another giant step forward last season.

Well, that didn’t really happen.

While secondary teammates Kalen King and Johnny Dixon took to new defensive coordinator Manny Diaz’s system like ants to a picnic, Hardy failed to feast – a disappointing year-to-year regression that sort of slid under the radar thanks to the Nittany Lions overall statistical dominance on defense.

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Sponsor: For The Blogy’s preseason football coverage is brought to you by Happy Valley United – the NIL collective representing every Penn State student-athlete. CLICK HERE to join the team and pledge your support.

Hand up, this exercise won’t be as fun or nearly as debatable as Wednesday’s ‘Build-A-Blocker’ blog featuring the Penn State offensive line…but we have an obligation to fill the digital newshole, so here we are.

Not only is Penn State’s 2023 RB room more top-heavy than a bodybuilder who ignores Leg Day, the dynamic duo sitting atop the depth chart – sophomores Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton – are vastly different runners with their own unique skillsets. And while that lack of redundancy between the two makes Batman and Fatman an ideal complementary 1-2 punch and a headache for opposing tacklers, it also makes this pick-and-choose hypothetical entirely predictable.

Heck, for the sake of mixing things up, we briefly considered adding an ‘Experience’ category to this story, so I could serve up a softball for fifth-year Minnesota transfer/Williamsport native Trey Potts…but Allen and Singleton’s individual freshmen season carries nearly eclipsed Potts’ four-year totals. So that wouldn’t have worked. Not to mention the stages and the stakes for Singleton and Allen’s runs were much grander than what Potts experienced.

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Lights dim.

A dull murmur that has been percolating throughout the theater for the past 10 minutes turns to silence within seconds.

The booming dialogue of Epic Movie Trailer Voiceover Guy (Sorry, I don’t know his name. You know, the ‘IN A WORLD…’ guy) begins:

“Leveraging two-and-a-half semesters of med school, a bottomless piggy bank of family money and an undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, one man is cobbling together genetic material from the best football players of our time to literally engineer perfect athletes.

On this leg of the journey, Dr. John Hammond swings by Happy Valley to collect samples for the perfect offensive lineman. Any missing/damaged sequences in the genetic code he plugs with Velociraptor DNA; what could possibly go wrong?”

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