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Pastimes : College Football: Nits, Gators, Bruins, Vols - Whoever! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nittany Lion who wrote (1428)	11/29/1999 1:59:00 PM
From: Cynic 2005	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11146

Have you seen the GA and G Tech game? Talk about the high powered offence!!! The final score of 51-48 looks more like basketball score. I think that Bull Dogs have been shagged by the referees! The fumble they rules in the final sec of the game was not a fumble. A play before that, I think it should have been a touchdown!

To: Nittany Lion who wrote (1428)	11/29/1999 7:30:00 PM
From: MythMan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11146

Lions no longer own November By Ron Bracken Centre Daily Times The dust from the implosion of Penn State's season has settled. The tears of frustration and disappointment have dried. A year of great promise has ended in disbelief and disillusionment. No one believed that Penn State could go winless in November, not the biggest fan, not the harshest critic. The 11th month had always been Penn State's month, the time of the year when the Lions peaked, when everything jelled. At least it was that way prior to 1993, when Penn State began playing a Big Ten schedule. Then the Pitts, Marylands, Temples, Boston Colleges and N.C. States - all teams Penn State dominated - disappeared from the November schedule, replaced by the Michigan States, Michigans and Wisconsins. And all of a sudden, November became the cruelest month. In the past three years the Lions have gone 5-7 in November, capped by this year's oh-fer. This one, of course, is by far the most disappointing to Penn State and its fans. With each successive loss the glow diminished until it finally winked out in the rain in East Lansing, Mich. Everyone has a theory as to how and why it happened. Some say coaching. The game has passed Joe Paterno by. Fran Ganter has the imagination of a cantaloup when it comes to calling plays. Jerry Sandusky has lost his touch, unable to come up with another magical defense like the one that beat Miami all those years ago. When the team was 9-0 these guys were all looking like geniuses. Now they've lost that title. But they are still the ones who know the answers to what went wrong, whether it's in the mirror or in the locker room. We, that being the collective we that includes fans and media, can only speculate based on partial information. And what we don't know hurts our credibility when we try to give a definitive answer. What is known is that Penn State was unable to produce a consistent running game that was effective in short-yardage situations. And you could build a case that all of the other problems stemmed from that. Because it couldn't run, it was forced into too many second-and-long, third-and-long, predictable passing downs. Because the opposition knew the Lions were going to pass, it could send blitzes from everywhere across the front, outmanning and overpowering the offensive line and hammering Kevin Thompson into the ground. Because the offense was unable to get a running game going, because it had to throw too often and couldn't convert enough of those third-and-long passes, the defense spent too much time on the field. And because the defense had to spend too much time on the field - 38 minutes against Michigan for example - it gradually wore down until, by the Michigan State game, two of its starters were out and most of the others were feeling the effects of a long and difficult season. If you're looking for bottom line evidence to support this theory, try this: For the season Penn State managed only 10 scores from the 5-yard line in and four of those came against an obviously overmatched Akron team. Now, if this were a truly scientific study, you'd need to find out how many attempts the Lions had from that distance and come up with a percentage of success. But this isn't science, rocket or otherwise. It's merely an attempt to advance one theory as to why a football team was unable to win three games that were clearly winnable. Along those same lines, you know a team's got problems with its running game when the backup quarterback is the No. 2 rusher. And most of Rashard Casey's runs were out of desperation, not design. And finally, you know that a team's offensive line is in trouble when it is starting its third center in the 11th game of the season. Good centers are hard to find and by the end of the season Penn State's search had ended with the move of Eric Cole, last year's starting center who had switched to guard in the spring, back to center to shore up the leak that had developed there. So you can say it was coaching that allowed that to happen, that it was coaching that never settled on a true go-to tailback and that it was coaching that was unable to right a ship that began listing to starboard as the season rolled along. But there were also some talent gaps that became exposed and exploited as the Lions got into their Big Ten schedule. In retrospect, then, you'd have to say that it was a true team effort, for better and for worse and that 9-3 is actually a pretty good fit for a team that had these kinds of problems.