HIGH IN THE RAFTERS

Like an old girlfriend you thought you had dumped months ago, I've returned to the upper echelon of sports blogging, also known as The Floating Lion. As a nice appetizer to my forthcoming posts, I've learned that the NIT Championship banner was recently raised in the BJC Rafters.

It looks beautiful and will certainly stand out among all of the Lady Lion accomplishments, and of course the unforgettable Men's 1954 Final Four banner. Here's to the hope that this is the first of many more new banners in the Jordan Center.

Also, I thought these were usually unveiled during the first home game of the next season. Whether the fact the athletic department was a little overzealous and premature in raising the flag remains to be seen. Either way, it will look great to fans and recruits.

BATTLE ILLUSTRATED

SportsIllustrated.com has posted a story about Penn State's star guard, Talor Battle. The Albany, NY product has enjoyed a meteoric rise arriving on campus to becoming one of college basketball's best point guards. The rising sophomore was recently honored by being named to the USA Basketball Roster for the World University Games this summer.

Read the article here.

FROSTING...THE NOMINEES - PART 2

Sparked by the upcoming season's unusually weak slate of games (especially non-conference), last week we introduced our hunt for Penn State's easiest schedule of the last 45 years.

With the first nominee already introduced, we now unveil the second in our list; this one from the 1970s.

1971

The 1971 Nittany Lions ran roughshod over everybody in their path to start the season 10-0. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to their third undefeated regular season in four years, they ran into the Tennessee Volunteers - the only club it played that season with more than seven wins.

The ten straight wins to open the 1971 campaign came via brutal domination by the Lions. Penn State's offense, led by one of the school's greatest backfields ever, Franco Harris and Lydell Mitchell, averaged 44 points per game over that stretch, and failed to put up more than 30 only once. The defense was just as impressive, surrendering just 10 points per contest and notching a pair of shutouts. Things would change in Knoxville however, as the fifth-ranked Lions were thoroughly beaten by the Vols, 31-11, on national television.

A closer look at those first ten opponents reveals a lackluster lineup including just one team with more than six wins and a group of five opponents that had just 12 total wins among them. The Lions started the year with back-to-back road games against Navy and Iowa, the former in the middle of a string of six straight losing seasons and the latter on its way to a one-win season; the tenth of nineteen straight non-winning campaigns. The Lions hung 66 points on a TCU team that may have been guilty of feeling a little too good about what would become a 6-4-1 season, it's only time finishing above .500 in 18 straight years.

1971 Schedule
@ Navy (3-8) W 56-3
@ Iowa (1-10) W 44-14
vs. Air Force (6-4) W 16-14
vs. Army (6-4) W 42-0
@ Syracuse (5-5) W 31-0
vs. TCU (6-4-1) W 66-14
@ West Virginia (7-4) W 35-7
vs. Maryland (2-9) W 63-27
vs. NC State (3-8) W 35-3
@ Pittsburgh (3-8) W 55-18
@ Tennessee (10-2) L 31-11

THE GOOD
Penn State played six road games this season and only five at home. It also had a true national schedule, playing games in six different states from Iowa to Tennessee. In addition, say what you want about the level of competition, but Penn State left no doubt as to how great it really was, winning its games by an average of 34 points.

THE BAD
The Lions played five teams with three or fewer wins, and only one squad that was ranked at the time of the game.

POSTSCRIPT
This Penn State team featured the one-two punch of Harris and Mitchell and although it didn't have a chance to prove it during the regular season, could have played with anybody in the country. It did finally get its chance in the Cotton Bowl, dismantling the Texas Longhorns and its wishbone attack, 30-6. Penn State would finish ranked fifth in the AP Poll, it's third top-five finish in four seasons. The Lions would post another double-digit win season the following year before going 12-0 in 1973 behind Penn State's only Heisman Trophy winner, John Cappelletti.

Check back to see the next nominee from the 1980s.

FROSTING...THE FIRST NOMINEE

Sparked by the upcoming season's unusually weak slate of games (especially non-conference), last week we introduced our hunt for Penn State's easiest schedule of the last 45 years.

Since this is a highly subjective and debatable subject, we are going to steer far clear of making a definitive decision and instead put the onus on you, the reader, to decide. We'll provide the facts and a bit of background and you provide the conclusion and award (or is it disgrace) one season with the title of "Weakest Penn State Schedule."

One final note, before unveiling the first nominee. This exercise says nothing of the process of making a schedule or who should take the blame for a soft schedule. We only want to know which year had the softest lineup of opponents. And without further adieu, here is the first of five nominees, one from each decade Joe Paterno has been the head coach.

1968

Joe Paterno enjoyed the first of his five unbeaten and untied squads in the 1968 season, and while this team was absolutely loaded with talent, the unblemished record came at the hands of some real creampuffs. The Lions' 10 opponents finished a combined 43-56 and not one of them was ranked at the time it played Penn State. The schedule did feature five road games, including a cross-country trip to take on the UCLA Bruins sandwiched between dates in Morgantown, WV and Chestnut Hill, MA, but also included six teams that failed to win more than half of their games. The true measure of the greatness of this team was somewhat crystallized when a total of 17 players who were on the 1968 roster were drafted into the NFL, including eventual Hall of Famer Jack Ham.

THE 1968 SCHEDULE

vs. Navy (2-8) W 31-6

vs. Kansas State (4-6) W 25-9

@ West Virginia (7-3) W 31-20

@ UCLA (3-7) W 21-6

@ Boston College (6-3) W 29-0

vs. Army (7-3) W 28-24

vs. Miami (5-5) W 22-7

@ Maryland (2-8) W 57-13

@ Pittsburgh (1-9) W 65-9

vs. Syracuse (6-4) W 30-12

THE GOOD:
The Lions had to play three straight road games, two of which came against teams with winning records.

THE BAD:
Penn State opened the year with a Navy squad that finished 2-8 and wrapped up its road schedule with a Pitt Panther team that was 1-9.


POSTSCRIPT:
The Lions would accept an invitation to The Orange Bowl in Miami, Fl to take on the sixth-ranked Kansas Jayhawks. Penn State would win in thrilling fashion after the Jayhawks were flagged for too many men on the field, giving the Lions a second chance at the game-winning two-point conversion, which Penn State scored on to take a one-point lead with just eight seconds left on the clock. The Nittany Lions finished the 1968 season ranked #2, behind an undefeated Ohio State Buckeyes team that had knocked off USC in The Rose Bowl. The next season, Penn State would once again run the tables to finish 11-0, but be overlooked by the national media and a certain president, winding up #2 behind the Texas Longhorns.

GREAT THINGS AWAITING, EXPECTED OF CLARK

Since Joe Paterno became head coach of the Penn State football program in 1966, nine players (including Curt Warner later this year) have been inducted into College Football's Hall of Fame. Exactly zero of them played quarterback. But just because none of Paterno's signal-callers have been immortalized in South Bend, it doesn't mean that this position isn't one of the greatest harbingers for the Lion's success in a particular season. As a matter of fact, it just about guarantees it.

Consider that Penn State will be led by senior captain Darryl Clark at quarterback this season. Last season he won the Big Ten's Offensive MVP award and joined Kerry Collins and Michael Robinson as quarterbacks that have guided the Lions to a Big Ten title. However, unlike Collins and Robinson, Clark accomplished this feat before his senior year, injecting Penn State fans with optimism for his final campaign - and for good reason.

Beginning in 1968, Penn State has enjoyed twenty 10+ win seasons under Paterno. The absolutely remarkable thing about this accomplishment is that each time a quarterback led the Lions to 10+ wins and returned for his next season, he did it again. Think about that. Never has a Paterno-coached quarterback failed to deliver after tasting success in the form of a double-digit win season! Seriously...I looked it up.

(click to enlarge)

A similar look at the history of 10+ win seasons over the same time period at Ohio State, Michigan, USC, Notre Dame and Alabama shows that this occurrence is unique to Penn State among those schools. And as more evidence that the quarterback is the major reason for this phenomenon, only once (1972-1973) has a first-year quarterback taken over a 10+ win Nittany Lions team and managed to repeat that accomplishment.

(click to enlarge)

The expectations facing Clark in 2009 include successfully defending the conference championship, being the captain to a team full of untested talent on both sides of the ball, improving on his own individual numbers to make a run to the Heisman trophy and continuing the newest Golden Age of Penn State football that he watched begin from the sidelines as a freshman in 2005. That may seem like a lot to lay on the shoulders of one man, but Clark has his teammates, all of Nittany Nation and history to rely on.

TOM BRADLEY SPEAKS, SO DOES JOE...SORT OF

ESPN.com blogger Adam Rittenberg caught up with Tom Bradley recently to talk about the Nittany Lions' defense. Bradley will once again have to prove why he is one of the top coaches in America as the Lions try to replace three starters on the defensive line and the entire secondary.


TOM BRADLEY PART I


TOM BRADLEY PART II



Meanwhile, EDSBS has posted the transcript from a "conversation" between the two winningest active coaches, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, about the controversy over some of Bobby's wins. Looks like Joe might not be as sympathetic as he's led us to believe.

FROSTING

The Penn State football team is coming off of an 11-2 campaign in 2008 that included a second conference title in four seasons, a berth in The Rose Bowl and the emergence of junior quarterback Darryl Clark as the Big Ten's Offensive MVP, but if the buzz surrounding the upcoming season is somewhat muted, blame the schedule.

While predictions for how the Nittany Lions will perform in defense of their conference crown are varied, the opinions on the schedule are consensus - it stinks. The Lions can't help the fact that the Big Ten appears to be short on contenders, but their non-conference schedule is truly atrocious. The four out-of-league opponents, Akron, Syracuse, Temple and Eastern Illinois, combined for just 12 wins against FBS competition last season, and none of them finished the year at .500 or better. Mix in the fact that all four of those games are at home and you've got a recipe for cupcakes.

That got us at The Floating Lion thinking about what were some of the weakest schedules the Lions have faced since Joe Paterno took over the program. It's easy to remember the many loaded schedules over the decades like 1982 (Pitt, Nebraska, Alabama, Notre Dame, West Virginia, Boston College) 1990 (Texas, USC, Notre Dame, Alabama, Pitt, Boston College) and 1999 (Pitt, Miami, Arizona, Ohio State, Michigan, Purdue, Michigan State) to name a few, but how about the bad ones? And, is 2009 the worst Penn State schedule of all time?

We've come up with a list of some of the team's weakest schedules, all in the hopes of putting this season's abomination in its proper place among the other soft lineups. We'll present each of them to you, before putting the question to a vote to find out which was the worst schedule of the last 45 years. Stay tuned...

HOMECOMING GAMETIME SET

Penn State officially announced on Monday that the Nittany Lions homecoming game against the Minnesota Golden Gophers on October 17 at Beaver Stadium will kickoff at 3:30 p.m. Along with the Iowa and Northwestern games, which were previously announced as beginning at 8:00 and 3:30 respectively, the Lions are slotted for three afternoon/primetime games this season with a fourth afternoon start (Ohio State) sure to follow.
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It was nearly a year ago that ESPN aired it's infamous Outside the Lines investigation into the criminal history of the Penn State football program. Many Blue and White fans still feel that the show was little more than a witch hunt and some conspiracy theorists hold that the show was an attack on Penn State and head coach Joe Paterno because of a hot-and-cold relationship with the network. At last check, ESPN was little concerned with fair and balanced reporting, but if it were, now might be a good time to prove it.

A good place to start would be an article written by Andrea Adelson of The Orlando Sentinel about the number of arrests the University of Florida program has suffered in the last four years...24 in case you were wondering.
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If you're looking to score tickets to that big game this year, your best chance might just to be to wait until the last minute. A post from The Business of College Sports from May 30 shows that ticket prices for some of this season's biggest rivalry games have actually gone down since they were last tracked in mid-March.

BUTTSCRATCHER!

It happens rather suddenly. One day, you're handling the off-season well - leafing through the sports pages, noting baseball box scores, and maybe even catching a period or two of an NBA or NHL playoff game. Then, all at once, like a tidal wave of suppressed memories and longings, that passion for college football arises and refuses to be ignored. Like an itch that must be scratched, college football has interrupted your regularly scheduled life and demands your attention.

It's been lurking beneath the surface since New Year's, but college basketball, opening day and the planning of summer vacations has done an adequate job of limiting it. Now, less than 12 weeks from the season's kickoff your resistance to the seduction of college football is futile.

Here at The Floating Lion, off-season football blogging has been nearly non-existent. Scouring the police blotters and reporting which 17-year-old kid "committed" to your school is hardly the kind of hard-hitting college football news that we relish commenting on. Still, we've silently observed as transfers, injuries and violations have helped to reshape the college football landscape and provide much-needed fodder for our addiction. Now, with the onset of preseason magazines and summer workouts, the focus of college football is back to where it should be, subjective analysis and daydreaming of 12-0.

So be sure to check back in frequently for updates and features that will help you get through the grueling homestretch before the season officially begins. Not that it ever really ended for any of us.