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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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Let It Flow, Let Yourself Go, Slow and Low, That Is The TemPro

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WARNING: The following image depicts graphic grass-stained content and scenes of excess mass, a bunch of Eastern European last names on the back of jerseys, plodding gains, 18 program-required knee braces, and foretells a never-ending cycle of overtime ineptitude that some might find disturbing.

Viewer (reader?) discretion is advised.

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It’s hideous! Oh, the humanity! Avert your gaze, children! (shudders)

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Country Roads – plus a late-season AD change and a Teflon $16.7 million buyout – took/kept WVU HC Neal Brown home to the place he probably doesn’t belong for a make-or-break (likely break) final stand. 

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Underneath the iconic roof of a $1.3 billion architectural marvel, seated behind a plastic folding table you can buy for 50 bucks from The Home Depot, West Virginia head coach Neal Brown – fresh off a family beach vacation – drew a strategically-placed, carefully-calculated line in the sand.

I’ll say this at the front,” Brown told the hundred or so sportswriters/Marriott Rewards Point stashers inside Jerry World who picked the Mountaineers to finish last in the conference at Big XII media days back in July. “Appreciate what you all do as far as covering college football and making it one of the top, um, really, sports, in, in, that’s out there.”

After fattening up these figurative hogs with a trough full of pleasantries, Brown began leading them to the verbal slaughter.

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 If You Can’t Hire The One You Love – Because of a BTS Coaching Search Power Struggle Ripped From the Pages of a ‘Succession’ Script– Love The One You Hired

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Editor’s Note: No Auburn Defense Film at 11 this week because until I slip and fall in the right place I have to keep my 9 to 5 – a job that had me on the road in BFE last week. Planning Offense and Defense Film at 11’s for Iowa, Ohio State, Maryland and Michigan. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Relationship Tip No. 1: Honeymoon with Akron.

No, not in Akron…unless you got some weird, out-there industrial plight and architectural decay fetish (hey dude, no judgment here). Honeymoon with Akron, perhaps the softest of several OOC schedule-filler marshmallows from the MAC.

That’s what unwanted, unwelcomed, 8^th-choice, not-from-‘round-here new Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin arranged Week 1, and 60 minutes and 60 points later Cupid’s arrow pierced the deep-fried hearts of Auburn’s meddlesome, never-satisfied, impossible-to-deal-with boosters…well, for one week, at least.

In the most prolific offensive debut in Auburn history, Harsin and new OC Mike Bobo called plays and pulled levers that amassed 600+ total yards, tallied the most points (60) in a game since 1971, and scored on their first eight possessions. Embattled and often erratic Tigers QB 10-Bo Nix – think Sean Clifford but with better hair – completed 20 of 22 throws vs. the zipless Zips, good for a single-game school record 90.9 completion percentage that really should have been 95.5 percent if Tigers WR 5-Kobe Hudson didn’t Featherstone this dot late in the second quarter.

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Editor’s Note: Each week during the season, the FTB Staff will release its scouting report on Penn State’s upcoming opponent. Normally, these blogs will be posted at 11 a.m. EST Thursday and Friday…but we’re a little premature this week. Hey, happens to the best of us. 

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Wisconsin defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard’s life is a John Cougar Mellencamp song waiting to be written.

Reared in Tony, Wisconsin, a ‘town’ of 113 people, Leonhard’s Herculean high school athletic accomplishments – gaining 500 total yards from scrimmage in a single football game, nailing 10 3-pointers in a basketball game, striking out 19 of 21 batters in 7 innings – sound so fantastical even Al Bundy and Uncle Rico call BS. But, apparently, it’s all true…or at least that’s how it reads on the giant wood Jim Leonard sign near the edge of town; you know, the one a guy in a “dusty, dented and scratched red Chevrolet Silverado 4×4 pickup truck” constructed few years back.

When no Division I school offered Leonhard a scholarship, he walked-on at Wisconsin, played four years, and was named All-American three times despite not earning a full-ride until his senior season (according to Wikipedia, anyway. This can’t be right, can it?!?! Dude was paying for his own Meal Plan while an All-American safety??!?!)

When no NFL team bothered drafting Leonhard, the 5-foot-8 Scrappy Doo made the Buffalo Bills roster as an UDFA and stuck around the league for decade, earning $9 million in the process.

And this past winter, when the bigger-than-Jesus (in Wisconsin, anyway) Green Bay Packers wooed and courted Leonhard to fill their vacant DC position, the Badgers’ 38-year-old X’s and O’s prodigy turned them down, explaining to madison.com, “I love being back here at my alma mater and honestly trying to take this program to places it hasn’t been.”

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