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Tre Wallace has averaged 86 yards through his first four games as a receiver for Ole Miss. He averaged 31 yards in 39 games as a Nittany Lion. Beau Pribula has thrown for 962 yards through his first four games at Missouri, which is 538 more yards than he logged through 24 games as a part-time Penn State quarterback.

Both of these former Lions are statistically out-pacing their current Penn State counterparts, which begs the question as the Lions prepare for one of their biggest regular-season games in years: Is there a fundamental flaw in Penn State’s offensive system?

To answer this question, which has been brought up more often than you would expect for a team ranked No. 2 and averaging a solid if not eye-popping 437 yards of offense per game, we must consider parts and wholes. The best football teams at any level of the game typically have better parts, on average, than their competitors, but the truly special teams can maximize the individual talents by getting them to blend into a synchronized, consistent whole.

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There’s a shortage of folks who can seamlessly code switch between profane tirades over football minutiae and waxing poetic about the magic of the Nittany Valley, and the cast of this progrum oversamples that population to an absurd degree. With Noble again sleeping off old age this week, Mailman, Horne, and Buchignani are left to fill another hour-ish of nominally Penn State football-related #content, so kick back, relax, and enjoy the start to Penn State’s bye week with the mix tape of eulogizing a Happy Valley icon, deep reflection on what it means to be a Penn Stater, and bitching about the insanity of the AP Poll that you didn’t know you needed.

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You might have had mixed feelings watching Kaytron Allen run into the end zone on Saturday.

It’s always fun to watch the Fatman in the open field, if you’re a Penn State fan, especially on a well-blocked play, and more fun if that run results in six points. However, you also might have wondered exactly what the hell Allen—and the rest of the offensive starters—were still doing in the game with just under 11 minutes to play in the fourth quarter against an FCS opponent.

The Nittany Lions’ third straight squandered cover win was another head-scratcher. They went right down the field on the game’s opening drive, covering 78 yards in 12 plays with a precision and a confidence that suggested they had purged many of the, uh, inconsistencies that we saw the first two weeks.

And then we saw about three more quarters of those inconsistencies.

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