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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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While the Penn State offensive line took several strides in the right direction last season, advanced run game metrics show the journey toward elite status is far from over.

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If you’ve been down on your luck and forced to eat Alpo for a month, Oscar Meyer suddenly tastes like dry-aged prime rib (don’t ask me how I know this).

If you’ve been forced to ride the bus to work, sardined between a sweaty, ripe construction worker and those flimsy, hard-to-trust mid-cabin folding doors, a ride in a 1996 Plymouth Breeze feels like cruising in a Bentley.

And, heaven forbid, if your kid’s relentless travel ball schedule monopolizes your summer, a work weekend spent alone at the Cedar Rapids Airport Econolodge might as well be a vacation in Maui.

In other words, it’s all about perception and context…which might help us explain why many Penn State followers (include us) are so giddy about the current state of the Nittany Lions offensive line. And, frankly, why the heck shouldn’t we be?

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