The offseason previews continue with our Week Two opponent, the Penn St Nittany Lions.

Doug Marrone’s first road game as a head coach is a doozy – a voyage to Happy Valley to face Penn St and their coach Joe Paterno.  This game is also number two of the Big 10 trilogy to start the season.

What we know:

The Lions return 10 starters (5 offense, 4 defense and the punter) from a team that went to the Rose Bowl and save for a tough loss at Iowa could have been playing for a national championship.  For the record the wins: Coastal Carolina, Oregon St, Cuse, Temple, Illinios, Purdue, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio St, Indiana, Mich St.  Losses: the aforementioned Iowa and USC.

Another run at Pasadena is very possible, as Penn St has won 40 games over the last four years.  This season should be no different.  There are studs at most of the key positions Daryll Clark at QB, Evan Royster at RB, DT Jared Odrick, LBs Navarro Bowman and Sean Lee.  Throw in getting Ohio St at home and it’s not a stretch to think that this team will be smelling roses by season’s end.

Spring Developments:

Building depth seems to be theme at spring.  There is no experience behind Clark, as Pat Devlin left to join DI wannabee Delaware.  True Frosh Kevin Newsome and a couple of walkon’s provide depth at QB.  With Clark having a propensity for concussions this is an alarming note to Nittany Nation.

Also the top 3 WRs from last season are gone, Brett Brackett appears to be the most talented/experienced.  The OLine also lost 3 starters, but Penn St always recruits well there.  They picked up stud Eric Shrive and see this year’s early fleecing of WPIAL’s top lineman right from under Pitt’s noses – including Miles Dieffenbach, whose dad coaches tennis at Pitt!

On defense, the twin tackling machines Lee (a former AA who missed last year) and Bowman will have to shoulder the load until a raw secondary has time to gel.  Although Bowman expects some time of suspension for violating his probation in April.  Nick Sukay, who was rumored to want to join his HS mates at Cuse, has found his way on the two deep.  The dline should have no trouble controlling the line of scrimmage either.

A good recap of the their spring game is provided by Black Shoe Diaries.  They make for an entertaining blog read as well.  Here are some highlights of PSU’s Spring game compliments of the Big 10 Network:

Why we can win:

I admit that I am hard pressed at this point to be able to supply a tangible reason for a victory.  If some sort of success is going to occur it will be via the air where Mike Williams could find success against a very inexperienced secondary.  But really that will be just filler points in what should be an easy game for JoePa.  I suppose if we knock Clark out of the game things could get interesting, but I don’t expect that.

Why we can lose:

This is really a bad matchup and a bad time to play a team like PSU.  They are a legit top 10 team and likely the toughest team on schedule.  Bowman and Lee will spend alot time wreaking havoc and making plays on our RBs.   Clark played barely a half last season.  I remember that they would try to get their passing game going and if it failed then Royster was there to bail them out.  It will look pretty similar this fall as well.

The Pick:

I think as a fan base we were all pretty happy to get PSU back on the schedule.  However we weren’t so thrilled with the thumping we took, although we totally expected it.  By now we should have an idea if it will be Paulus or Nassib that will be thrown to the Lions, although we know that both should log some PT in this one.  Either way, the talent gap will be quite telling in this one.  We will be hard pressed to match last year’s 55-13 drubbing.  I will expect a bit more pride on defense this year, but not much offense.  At this point I will predict a 45-7 type result.

What do you say?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:32 am by LvilleOrange . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.