Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1378330
- broadcast, it was hard not to think about just how much the world had changed in the preceding months. In any other year, those seats would have been filled with passionate fans screaming their lungs out, another rendition of the great com- munal ritual that is a Penn State White Out. But not this year. As the Nittany Lions prepared for the opening kickoff, there were only a handful of family members in attendance, two lonely con- tingents of fans scattered behind the op- posing benches and bathed in the harsh horror-movie glare of the stadium's floodlights. Yes, this was still the Beav, but the foreboding atmosphere made it feel more like the Bates Motel. Maybe that sounds like an exaggera- tion. Maybe you're thinking that some- thing as celebratory as a college football game could never evoke a horror movie, not even a college football game played at night, in a nearly empty stadium, on Halloween. Think again. When Penn State took the field last season – not just for the Ohio State game but for the eight others it managed to play – that's exactly what was running through defensive coordi- nator Brent Pry's mind. "I'm going to show my age here," Pry said recently, "but a lot of times you would run out of that tunnel and it was like an Alfred Hitchcock show, you know? Or 'The Twilight Zone.' It was just weird coming out of that tunnel and seeing nobody in those seats." Weird is one of the more benign words to de- scribe the envi- ronment in which Penn State was forced to play last fall. Unsettling, unnerving, bewildering – those work, too, and for reasons that went beyond the team's inability to summon its 12th man for home games. For years, the Nittany Lions had used the scale and spectacle OPEN HOUSE Penn State's April 23 scrimmage was open to the general public. Photo by Steve Manuel