To: MythMan who wrote (7093 ) 11/17/2002 11:13:14 AM From: happynappy Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 11146 <<Joe played the wrong guy>> I'll expand on that for both Wildstar and Dennis Von Pizza. You've seen the chatter on this thread over the last two or two and 1/2 years. We have really been down on the coaching staff. And its pretty much been a disease of the '90, excepting '94 (BTW Paterno NOW admits he lost the national championship on them because of the Indiana game that year). No sh*t. Paterno and his group of coaches (and it HAS mostly been the pigheaded Eye-talian) all of a sudden in old age thought that sticking with and actually playing your upperclassmen was the thing to do. In the meantime, the good old upperclassmen began to realize this and take advantage of the old man. That included breaking team rules, not treating their bodies and minds very well (drinking into the wee hours of Fri AM.) ,etc etc etc. Now Myth and I know this first hand because over the stretch of time from '97 to current, we've had(have) relatives on campus. Paterno has stuck with bad QB's, bad running backs, bad DB's and walkon LB'ers that were, hummm, bad !!! On top of all that Joepa truly believed that the old game was the right game, that we could slug it out in the Big Ten. But guess what, we were too small and the Big Ten pushed us around. Then they went mobile. Enter Zack Mills....bye- bye I-formation, hello formation that won us the '82 nat. championship. Hello underclassmen. Larry Johnson got screwed but he is making the best of it. You know JoePa realizes he was dead wrong, because he is playing him a little too long. He'd never in a 100 years(and he still may be coaching then), let a back run up over 300 yards. Joe's gonna get him to the Heisman dinner. Bottom line: Bad coaching back on track from the winningest coach and a tremendous revelation within himself. Somehow out of all of this, Joe's successor will emerge and you wont here me bitch about it!!! As always, HappyNappy