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• Prior to tonight, the last time Minnesota backup QB/full bag of Scrabble tiles Athan Kaliakmanis started a football game, THIS was the setting:

Needless to say, to steal a phrase from former Penn State defensive tackle and Friend of the Blog Brandon Noble, THIS (below) was an entirely different animal.

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Preaching to the choir here, but the Penn State Whiteout is truly a sight to behold – as ABC announcer Chris Fowler said a few years ago, an unmatched display of “monochromatic mayhem.”

For us, the festivities begin well before Saturday and extend through the night as evening turns to morning. Like those 1980s Energizer commercials, the party keeps going and going and going…the only interruption occurring around 7:30 p.m. with a 4-hour, 110-decibel intermission.

Of course, the Whiteout isn’t all fun and games, especially for sticky-fingered, sauce-centric grill guys like us. In fact, our typical tailgate menu is basically kryptonite for pristine Whiteout attire. Sizzle, splatter, spirits and sauce = stains.

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Introduction

Annnnd Scene.

Well, it’s Tuesday night. Like a runover raccoon, the Michigan debacle grows more and more distant in the rearview mirror as we move forward and face another horse-and-plow rushing attack, that being P.J.’s coxswains led by former Minnesota OC/former PSU OC/current Minnesota OC Kirk Ciarrocca. For those of you who like to bury traumatic, painful memories at inaccessible depths within in your subconscious mind, James Franklin hired Ciarrocca to replace Ricky Rahne in late December 2019. Four wins and several hundred Zoom meetings later, Franklin dumped Ciarrocca in favor of ousted Texas OC Mike Yurcich.

Today we’re going to compare Ciarrocca and Yurcich by examining how they fared in several basic and advanced stat categories while at Penn State, and during Ciarrocca’s two tenures at Minnesota.

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Introduction

Technically, the game hasn’t ended, yet here I am letting my fingers clack away on the keyboard because the competitive phase of this Big Noon Nightmare has been over for close to 45 minutes. Other than a Carnival-Ring-Toss-Bounce Pick Six and Sean Clifford’s 62-yard run in his old man Nike Air Monarchs, not a lot went right for the good guys in white. This was (is…) a wakeup call for the Penn State fanbase as it dramatically hits the hopes for a Big Ten championship, playoff appearance, and a breakthrough from the previous two years of mediocrity. All that’s left to ponder is whether this 5-0 start will turn out to be fools gold like last year’s 5-0 start.

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The worst-kept secret in college football is that there are the haves, and the have-nots, and that the gap between them seems more likely to expand than to contract.

One of the teams in Michigan Stadium moved a step closer toward cementing itself as a “have” on Saturday. The other left little doubt that, at least for the time being, it remains in the other category.

Penn State lost 41-17 to Michigan and the game was not that close. Read that sentence again for emphasis. The Nittany Lions won the turnover battle, did not give the ball away, and converted all of their red-zone opportunities — all key parts of the formula that had led to their 5-0 start.

And none of it mattered.

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• Perhaps we’ve reached the ACCEPTANCE stage of grief, because we’re all out of spittle, all out of veins bulging from our angry foreheads, all out of cuss words, all out of pillows to scream into, all out of reasons to let this forever-good/never-“ELITE” program ruin our afternoon. THIS IS PENN STATE FOOTBALL…a cockroach that feasts in the comfortable obscurity of also-ran BTN/ESPN 2 broadcasts, but scatters and disappears when the bright lights flip on. It’s one thing to lose to Michigan on the road. It’s quite another to have Joel Klatt twist the knife by saying, “I don’t know how this game could have been any closer than (41-17)?” That comment stings worse than rubbing alcohol on a knee scrape because it’s 100 percent accurate. For two programs that recruit and sign the same caliber of player, this was Varsity vs. JV, at best.

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From Last Year To This Year, Penn State Has Made Substantial Gains in the Run Game. But Why? What’s Changed? What’s Different?

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2022 season coverage is sponsored by FANATICS. Spare the embarrassment of showing up to Beaver Stadium in LAST year’s sweat- & alcohol-stained gear. Grab something fresh from our collection of Penn State jerseys, T-shirts, and more right HERE.

We’ve all heard/read the dreadful numbers, but for the sake of posterity, here they are again: Last year, the Penn State Nittany Lions managed only 107.8 rushing yards/game. That ranked 13th in the 14-team B1G.

This year, the run plays on Mike Yurcich’s laminated card have yielded much better results on the ground. Roughly midway through the season, Penn State sits solidly in the middle of the conference pack in most rushing metrics. “We Are” clipping along with 192.6 rushing yards/game (5th) and — excluding kneel-downs — 5.2 Y/C (t-4th). For reference, even in the Wondrous Saquon Days Penn State never got higher than 6th in the B1G in rushing yards.

So, we pondered, to what do we owe this dramatic turn-around on the ground in 2022?

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The season starts on Saturday.

Yes, I know five Penn State games have already been played this season. I watched them all and have decent memories of doing so. Like you, I watched Nick Singleton explode into the national consciousness, Manny Diaz smother out-matched offenses with guile and aggression, and Sean Clifford … do what Sean Clifford does. I watched a team of Nittany Lions that looked, at times, very much like the .500ish group of the last two years and, at others, like a legitimate conference contender.

All of that was prelude. The only way that any of those games would have truly mattered is if Penn State had lost any of them. But they did not, so that they wiped out Auburn by more than most would have anticipated and subdued Central Michigan and Northwestern by a lot less than anticipated (not even Vegas can adequately predict which version of this team will show up on any given week), means the same as if they had defeated all five opponents 42-0 or 7-3.

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