THINKS THE EAGLES STOLE ONE
Another Senior Day at Beaver Stadium is fast approaching, and Saturday's final home game (against Indiana) for Penn State's departing veterans will again prove to be a time for hugs, tears and misty, water-colored memories of the way they were . . . or at least the way they'd like to think they were.
"It's going to mean a lot to me," tight end Andrew Quarless said of the last time he and his fellow seniors will run out of the tunnel for an afternoon of football before the standard adoring turnout of 105,000-plus. "My time here just flew by. It felt like it was just yesterday when I started."
But with reminiscences come recriminations, and for this bunch of exiting Nittany Lions, there are more than a few. Twice this season, they and their teammates burst out of the Beaver Stadium tunnel favored in defining Big Ten Conference games, and twice they returned, chastened, after losses to Iowa and, last week, Ohio State.
For middle linebacker Josh Hull, the former walk-on who joined the team in 2005, when Penn State bounced back from a period in which it had four losing seasons in 5 years to go 11-1 and win the Orange Bowl, this fond farewell will always be more about what might have been instead of what was.
"Coming into this season, myself as well as the rest of the leaders on this team expected to play for the national championship," Hull said. "We knew we had the athletes, we knew we had the coaching staff. Everything we needed to play for the national championship, we have here at Penn State."
Given that the Nits were 11-2 in 2008, ranked as high as third in the nation at one time and appeared in the Rose Bowl, it was not an entirely unreasonable belief. But wishing does not, and never has made it so, and the defeats to Iowa and Ohio State illustrated what a number of analysts had believed all along: Penn State would need time to break in a mostly new offensive line, receiving corps and secondary, and its special-teams play also was a question mark whose answer needed to be in the affirmative, something that has yet to happen.
Now, with an 8-2 overall record that includes a 4-2 mark in the league, the incomplete grade on Penn State's season probably is somewhere around a B-minus, with only so much room to bolster the final report card. The Nits will be favored against the Hoosiers (4-6, 1-5) and in the regular-season finale at Michigan State, and, hey, a lot of teams would be more than happy to go 10-2, right?
"If we win out, there's still a great chance we can get to play in a BCS bowl," Hull said as hopefully as a kid who wants to believe that expensive toy his family probably can't afford will be under the tree on Christmas morning. "If not a BCS bowl, there's still a great chance for us to play in a Jan. 1 bowl."
Quarless, counting a couple of chickens before they're hatched, said, "I'm thinking 10-2 is not a disaster."
But Paterno has been down this path before - 43 previous times, in fact - and he understands that nothing is promised in football, not on Senior Day or any other presumed celebratory occasion. Even the bottom-feeding Indiana Hoosiers can turn out to be the Grinch that stole Christmas, or at least New Year's Day.
So don't bother trying to bait Paterno into saying how great it'll be to soak up all that emotion when stalwarts of the program like Jared Odrick, Dennis Landolt and co-captains Sean Lee and Daryll Clark take their final bows on Saturday. He won't nibble.
"I don't have the luxury to sit around and say, 'I love so-and-so,' " said Paterno, who no doubt has cleared some space his heart for certain guys who wore the blue-and-white. "We've got a tough job ahead of us this week.
"We were out in Chicago for the Northwestern game and there were about eight [former players] on the sidelines - four or five I hadn't seen in years. They brought back some memories of a lot of different situations. But still . . . "
Someone asked JoePa whether, before the season, he would have considered 10-2 a good result for a young, evolving team with so many untested players in key positions.
"Right now we're only 8-2 and have a tough game this week," Paterno said. "I'll think about it at the end if that happens. But I think maybe we have to be a little more realistic each year. When you look at a lot of things that go into it . . . if we wind up 10-2, that's a pretty darn good year."
Starting left guard Johnnie Troutman (leg) came out in the second quarter against Ohio State, hasn't practiced this week and, according to coach Joe Paterno, won't play against Indiana. Matt Stankiewitch will start his third game of the season in his stead . . . The punt-coverage unit could feature several new faces after Ohio State's Ray Small had big returns of 41 and 45 yards to set up touchdowns for the Buckeyes.
|
|
|
|
|
|
