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• Throughout the offseason, we paid tribute to the infamous, ludicrous, incredibly loose-jowled Beano Cook/Ron Powlus 2 Heisman prediction from 1993 by applying the same lofty expectations any time we mentioned 5-star PSU true freshman Drew Allar in a video, blog post, tweet, Facebook comment, etc…you know, to be funny. Turns out – according to the tents pitched on Penn State twitter around 2:30 pm EST today — we set the bar WAAAAAY too low with our Beano homage.

• In all seriousness, the quantum leap Allar has taken in 5 months – from shaky, raw, multiple-red-flags rookie in the Blue-White Game to the surprisingly poised, surprisingly in-command , surprisingly advanced thrower we’ve seen in limited snaps vs. Purdue and now Ohio – is a credit to not only the work Allar put in during the summer months, but a credit to Mike Yurcich’s ability to mold talented lumps of clay.

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Sponsor: Whether tailgating in Happy Valley or watching the action at home, take your Saturday spread to the next level with Sauces, BBQ Dry Rubs and Bloody Mary Mix from the 409 Tailgate Club. Visit 409’s Online Store HERE.

When you think of Penn State, what indelible images/mental snapshots come to mind?

Racing to finish two scoops of Peachy Paterno as it melts under the merciless sun of an Arts Fest weekend…Saying hello to the extrovert squirrels frolicking across the Old Main lawn…Choking on the musty smell of books sandwiched within the Pattee Stacks…Baking on Beaver Stadium’s metal bleachers as Penn State toys with a non-conference pushover to open the home slate.

All good choices.

But, for us anyway, there’s another image – an off-the-radar Penn State image – that always warms the cockles of our heart every time we spot it in Happy Valley.

It’s a bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, proudly positioned on a shelf (not the top shelf), iconic label staring you down from behind the bar.

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Lions & Twists & Stunts, Oh My! Billed as an Exotic Break From the Brent Pry Norm, Act One of ‘The Manny Diaz Experience’ Turned Out to be Surprisingly Efficient and Effective, as well.

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BOX SCORE      FTB CHARTING

Thanks for nothing, Fox Sports Graphics Team.

As the rest of you spent this holiday weekend celebrating the American workforce by driving around town in your Japanese-made cars, floating atop your Chinese-made innertubes, and sipping German beer, the infrequently hard-working folks at FTB were vigorously spinning the hamster wheel of creativity, desperate to find the perfect lead for the inaugural ‘Hindsight’ review of the Manny Diaz era.

After racking our brains for literally dozens of seconds, we spent the next hour screwing around on our phones watching some disembodied voice rip open packs of junk wax baseball cards from the 1980s (oddly soothing and satisfying, highly recommend). Then, we snapped back to the task at hand, re-focused for a good minute, and settled on this corny bit where we turned two Manny Diaz defensive formations into Rorschach inkblots and had an imaginary psychward patient guess the down and distance.

There was just one problem…the ‘splotchy’ EFX on Photoshop wasn’t enough to blur out Fox’s superimposed on-field down and distance graphic, thus ruining the bit. Such a shame.

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Though James Franklin’s well-worn weekly 1-0 objective was met, reviews of Mike Yurcich’s Year 2 debut vary from ‘meh’ to ‘Man, not this again.’

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If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then surely embedding the viral gif of Purdue safety Chris Jefferson’s Puke-6 regurgitation celebration – a true Icky Shuffle – into this blog post should thoroughly summarize Penn State’s 2022 opening act on offense.

But we’re not going to do that. Shocking, we know.

Given the sophomoric DNA of this media enterprise, you have every reason to drop your jaw and raise your eyebrow(s) right now. Leading off the third season of ‘Hindsight’ with a man vomiting on live television is the content equivalent of a hanging slider, right over the plate, seconds after the clubhouse attendant banged on a trash can to let us know what’s coming…and yet, we’re taking the figurative pitch, 1. Because it’s super gross, repulsive, humiliating, offensive, distasteful, crude, objectionable, and, according to the fable of David Hogan from the movie Stand By Me, a dangerous contagious projectile, and 2. …

…Because every time we tried to embed the gif, WordPress crashed.

Stupid technology.

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Introduction

“I have lived seven lifetimes tonight.” – Me

Though my fingers will clack clack away for a dozen or so paragraphs, I don’t really have words for what happened on the first day of September in the year 2022 A.D. (or C.E. or whatever we’re doing these days). I do know this, though: all Penn State fans aged exponentially this week, lower our life expectancy at least ten years. Talk about a rollercoaster. We went from Sean Clifford starting poorly, to being really good, to leaving for Drew Allar, to coming back and being awful, to leading one of the most impressive drives this side of Iowa City in 2017. We watched a Purdue receiver who had 500 yards in 3 seasons at Buffalo and Iowa roast the “vaunted” Penn State secondary for 153 yards and a touchdown. The Penn State defense looked suspect on some drives but came up huge in the last two Purdue possessions to give the Nittany Lions a chance and lock up the win, respectively. The run game had 77 yards in the first half, which was on pace for “pretty good,” only to finish with 98. We’ll do some fun stat-y stuff below, but there is absolutely zero that can be taken away from this game in terms of trends. This game was like the AMC stock of college football.

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Ever procrastinate? Sure you have. You’ve put stuff off that probably should have been done today, and sometimes, you get a lucky break along the way—the boss decides he doesn’t need that presentation from you for another week, or your wife decides she wants to get a different tile for that bathroom renovation you’ve been putting off. So you feel justified in procrastinating. But you’re really not.

For the first, oh, 56 minutes of Penn State’s opener at Purdue, a disaster scenario was shaping up for the Nittany Lions. Sean Clifford was playing like, well, Sean Clifford, lifting the Nittany Lions to a healthy lead early then helping the Boilers get right back in it with a flurry of wildly inaccurate passing in the second half. The disaster part is that, when Clifford missed a series while getting an IV, Drew Allar came in the game and, in just four passes, stole the hearts of every Penn State fan and gave us an oh-so-brief but oh-so-tantalizing glimpse of what could be. Those four passes resulted in two completions, a drop, and a wobbly (but fast-moving) duck that had no chance, but damn it, the kid looked the part. Never mind the accuracy and the velocity, but he showed a true pocket presence—eyes downfield, feet moving but never retreating—that a certain other quarterback has shown for only slivers of a six-year career.

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• Gus Johnson: “That’s one of the best drives, Joel Klatt, that I’ve ever seen!” Gus…buddy…look…you’re excited; I’m excited; we’re all excited, OK? But, please, a little perspective. You do realize there’s a drive called THE DRIVE, right? Right?

• Good lord, where to start? Scrolling back and re-reading our in-game Twitter feed (before the phone died…thanks Jobs), we were pretty damn grouchy, so why don’t we flip the script and shovel down our ice cream before we hold our nose and force-swallow that pile of lima beans so Mom lets us leave the table and go to bed.

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Introduction

Finally, the season is upon us! Bring on the first college football Saturday Thursday!

Much like last year, the Big Ten schedule makers left Penn State no room for non-conference creampuff foreplay as the Nittany Lions are forced to go in raw against another winning Big Ten West foe to get things started. And much like last year, one of the largest preseason questions marks looming over Penn State’s 2022 fortunes is the potential potency of the offense.

Rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, most of the uncertainty falls on the shoulders of QB1 Sean Clifford.

Clifford’s QB counterpart in the season opener is Purdue’s Aidan O’Connell – an unheralded walk-on and one time 8^th string QB on the Boilermakers depth chart (seriously, that isn’t a joke. He was.) who somehow morphed into an All-Big Ten thrower. Statistically speaking, O’Connell ranked 2^nd or 3^rd in most major passing categories last year, only trailing behind Ohio State QB/G Wagon driver CJ Stroud, a Heisman finalist.

Now that we’ve set both QBs up, let’s compared the two, shall we?

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