Penn State Whips Colgate

In 1959 I saw Syracuse shut out Colgate 71-0 in the last home game of that championship season. The Orange led 30-0 after the first period, and 45-0 at the half. My guess is that the second string played the entire second half, but that didn’t give Colgate much relief, because an LA sportswriter said, after Cuse had demolished UCLA in the final game of the season, that although it was clear SU was the best team in the nation that year, the second best team may have been their second string. The annual Colgate game, which had meant so much to both schools early in the last century, stopped being played soon after the '59 season. The two teams just weren’t in the same league any more.

Today we went to the dome and saw Penn State crush the Orange, 55-13. It was 21-0 after the first quarter; the Orange didn’t record a first down until the 12 minute mark of the second quarter. Actually, I was surprised the score was so close. Late in the first half, SU had the ball with under three minutes to play, and Paterno called a couple time outs, so that his guys could get the ball back without much time on the clock. Many of the fans booed, figuring it was wrong for Penn State to run up the score.

But in truth, Penn State wasn’t running up the score; they were just practicing. It was a scrimmage. Joe Pa wanted his kids to run their two minute drill, which they did quite well, moving the ball down the field in under a minute, and kicking a long field goal with only a few seconds left in the half. Later in the year, when Penn State plays Michigan or Ohio State, and they really need to run the two minute drill, it will be a good thing that they practiced the two minute drill today. In reality, they could have scored almost at will; or they could have run the ball down our throats all day long. Instead, they tried out a bunch of different plays, many of which didn’t work so well, and also moved players in and out of the lineup, giving everyone, and everything in the playbook, a tryout.

I went back and looked at the numbers from 1959. The Orange had five shutouts that year (keep in mind, we’re talking football here, not baseball), and in another three games, they allowed a single touchdown, or less. For the entire season, for the ten regular season games they played, their defense gave up fewer than 200 rushing yards. That was an average of 19 yards of rushing offense allowed per game. This year, against the likes of Northwestern and Akron, they have surrendered over 200 yards rushing in every game. Every game their opponent runs the ball more than the 59 team allowed for an entire season.

I was amazed at first by the size of the crowd, reported at close to 46,000. On closer inspection, however, I saw that much of the crowd was wearing Penn State’s blue and white. I figure that by the fourth quarter, the crowd was predominantly Penn Staters. We left at the half, with the Orange down 38-6, and really, why would anyone want to see any more? I don’t know how bad it can get, but it’s hard to imagine anything much worse than this. Next week they play Northeastern, which is not a Division I-A team. So if we do well, we should schedule St. John Fisher, and Brockport State, reinstate Colgate to the schedule, and finish the season at Tufts. We might not win all those games, but at least we’ll be competitive.