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• Thanks to the 4^th Estate assigned to cover all the ins and outs/nooks and crannies/snaps crackles and pops of Penn State Football, we learned this week that the Gen Z Nittany Lions are huge fans of cranking the loud speakers up to 11 and blasting Phil Collins at practice. Who knew? Since that’s the case, might we suggest skipping the haunting tones of In The Air Tonight or sick synth beats of Sussudio and instead just play Land of Confusion on a continuous loop this week and next? Because no song title hits the nail on the head better when it comes to describing the current state of the Penn State offense.

• Yes, the Nittany Lions pushed their FBS-best streak of 30+ point games to 12 today. But it wasn’t easy. And it definitely wasn’t pretty. EVERYTHING THE OFFENSE DOES JUST SEEMS HARD. I don’t know how else to explain it. Zero flow. Zero rhythm. Zero consistency. Zero identity. As we wrote in our ‘Dial M For Methodical’ blog post earlier this week, “…like a disgruntled significant other who sat you down for one of those ‘We Need To Talk’ talks, it’s not just ONE thing. It’s a lot of things.’”

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It may not be quite what we all expected, but the 4-0 Nittany Lions are winning in an impressive fashion that will serve them well down the line.

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“I run six plays, split veer. It’s like Novocain. Just give it time, it always works.”

– Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, “Remember the Titans”

“There’s no greater feeling than to be able to move a man from Point A to Point B against his will.”

– NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Russ Grimm

“I feel like everybody would prefer to have the one- or two-play drive… But it is a different type of satisfaction when you’re out there, and you’re 10, 12, 15 plays in… because you feel like whatever you could do, they can’t stop it.”

– Penn State offensive guard Saleem Wormley

These are two of my favorite football quotes (even though the latter is from a Pitt alum – nobody’s perfect, after all – and the former is fiction) followed by a key member of the 2023 Nittany Lions summing up how it felt to smother the Iowa Hawkeyes with methodical brute force. Taken together, they form a kind of short story about the first quarter of Penn State’s season.

To the extent some fans worried or grumbled after the Lions took apart West Virginia on national television to open this year’s campaign, it can be traced to the ways in which a dominant 38-15 outing still fell short of expectations rooted in preseason hype. In the eight months that elapsed between Penn State’s Rose Bowl win over Utah and the end of Summer training camp, this year’s team had been built up so much in people’s minds that some folks seemed to be expecting to see the 1994 offense and 1986 defense paired together from the opening snap. When every pass rush didn’t result in a sack and every Nick Singleton carry a 60-yard scamper, there was a palpable sense of, “What gives?”

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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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For the Penn State offense, it’s starting to feel like 2020 again, boys and girls. And, believe it or not, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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We were promised fireworks – the big, loud, colorful, explode-y sort; the kind your Instagram followers (or Facebook friends if you’re 55) insist on posting every July 4^th for reasons that escape us – but through four weeks our hands are starting to burn from holding sparklers too long.

We were told this would be a thrill ride in a Ferrari – fast, exhilarating, the ultimate six-figure neutralizer of height and physical appearance – and instead we’re stuck in a Ford Fiesta Uber with a driver who won’t stop talking. Yeah, sure, we’re reaching our desired destination but the journey from Point A to Point B  has been several galaxies shy of glamorous thus far.

All off-season, pundits gabbed we’d see the best of Mike Yurcich. You know, deep balls flung all across the yard. Rainbows. Points-a-plenty. Home run carries. Pixie dust. Puppy dogs. Exotic formations that feel like your first kiss. Tempo. Smashmouth spread. Taco Bell at 3:14 a.m., eight drinks deep. And yet, if anybody had the gumption to tug at the third-year PSU OC’s five-o’-clock shadow, it wouldn’t shock us if the guy pulling the offensive levers is really Kirk Ciarrocca in a Scooby Doo “bad guy” mask.

Statistically speaking, the 2023 Penn State offense makes zero sense. Blue and White bizzarro world.

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As in football as in life, the best-laid schemes…something, something, something. Sorry, we never read the poem.

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Not that the Nittany Lions needed to do anything too fancy, but Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich called a pretty methodical, vanilla game – which, I suppose, is a fitting flavor for a White Out.

Tasked with scoring one point (1!) to best the stacked-on-cinderblocks, front-lawn jalopy that is Brian Ferentz’s offensive attack (double entendre), Penn State’s bland recipe for success leaned on its beefy blockers to win at the line of scrimmage, stacked bruising-but-boring drive-sustaining runs, and tossed in an occasional play-action opportunity in the Red Zone to boost QB Drew Allar’s stat line.

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Was Penn State playing a little possum in the first three weeks of the season? Did it decide sometime this week or even this summer that it was going to beat Iowa in pitch-perfect Kirk Ferentz fashion? Does Drew Allar owe Jalen Hurts usage rights fees for the Tush Push?

These are the things we found ourselves pondering late in the rarest of rarities, a 31-0 Penn State blowout/shutout of perennial nemesis Iowa. In what looked like the perfect conditions for a classic Hawkeye Cro-Magnon rock fight, in which the punters are the best and most active players on the field and modern offense is rendered moot, James Franklin’s team started slowly but steadily, took reasonable control of the game in the first half and then blew it open after halftime, doing so with a running game that continued to wear down a very good Iowa defense, a diverse passing attack that utilized the tight end in very much the same way Iowa has haunted Penn State defenses over the years, and a defense that made a Brian Ferentz offense look even more feeble than usual, if such a thing is actually possible.

Whew.

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Don’t bet on an easy outing against Iowa, the trickster antagonist that’s tormented Penn State.

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Even in these declining days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which captivated audiences and ruled the box office during the 2010s, if you bring up the character of Loki to most people, it conjures Tom Hiddleston’s performance as chief antagonist in the first Avengers film and a recurring enemy (but occasional ally) of Earth’s mightiest heroes. The comic book creation on which the movie character is based was derived from actual Norse mythology, in which Loki is typically the mischief maker and obstacle to the forces of good, but every so often, the critical keystone to advancing the hero’s progress.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the mythological figure who inspired the modern version we know from comics and cinema:

Scholars have debated Loki’s origins and role in Norse mythology, which some have described as that of a trickster god. Loki’s relation with the gods varies by source; he sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves maliciously towards them.

On the big screen, Loki earned his status as the archnemesis viewers loved to hate by attempting to conquer the planet and subjugate humanity, repeatedly betraying his heroic brother Thor, and generally making life miserable for all our favorite superheroes. Despite this track record of deception and destruction, the on-screen character has kept true to his real-life inspiration by emerging as an unlikely anti-hero in later installments of a meta-narrative that spans films and streaming shows.

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