Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1530530
J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 5 19 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M FIVE YEARS AGO, 2020 In the most eagerly awaited dual meet of the 2019-20 wrestling season, top- ranked Iowa rallied to defeat No. 2 Penn State, 19-17, on Jan. 31 in Iowa City. The Nittany Lions led 11-4 after Nick Lee's 20-5 technical fall over Iowa's Carter Happel at 141 pounds. They were still ahead by four points in the team scoring after ninth-ranked Aaron Brooks pulled out a 7-3 decision over Iowa's sixth-ranked Abe Assad. But the Hawkeyes boasted a pair of top-10 wres- tlers in the 197- and 285-pound weight classes, and they earned decisions over No. 18 Shakur Rasheed and No. 15 Seth Nevills, respectively, to allow the hosts to slip past PSU in front of 14,905 fans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Iowa coach Tom Brands called it "a heavyweight boxing match, a fist fight. … You get in trouble for saying that, but it's a fist fight back and forth. Whatever the crowd was, I don't think anybody left." Those fans had reason to be excited; Penn State hadn't lost a Big Ten dual meet since falling to the Hawkeyes at the Bryce Jordan Center in February 2015. Since that point, however, the Lions have retaken control of the series, winning the past three duals between the two col- legiate wrestling powerhouses. 10 YEARS AGO, 2015 It had been a rough month for the Penn State men's basketball team. The Nittany Lions dropped their first five games of the new year, including an 84-77 overtime decision to visiting Purdue on Jan. 17, a game in which guard D.J. Newbill scored 37 points, the highest single-game total for a PSU player since 1965. The skid ended in an emphatic way when the Lions welcomed Rutgers to the BJC on Jan. 24. Newbill scored 23, and for- ward Brandon Taylor added 16 to lift Penn State to a 79-51 victory. The 28-point margin was PSU's biggest since defeating Mount St. Mary's by 29 points in Decem- ber 2011. "We played Penn State basketball for 40 minutes, which we haven't done be- fore today," Newbill said after leading the Nittany Lions to their first Big Ten victory of the season. They played Penn State basketball again four nights later in a gritty 63-58 win over visiting Minnesota. Newbill finished with a team-high 12 points in the low-scoring contest, helping the Nittany Lions im- prove to 14-7 overall and 2-6 in confer- ence play heading into the final month of the regular season. 25 YEARS AGO, 2000 Anchored by a pair of standout seniors in point guard Helen Darling and forward Andrea Garner, the Penn State women's basketball team got off to a 9-2 start in 1999-2000, with its only losses coming against No. 25 Duke and No. 1 Connecti- cut. When the calendar flipped to January, the Lady Lions kept up their relentless pace. They began the new year with a 114- 49 thrashing of Northwestern on Jan. 2 at the Bryce Jordan Center, and they went on to win eight of nine that month, with seven of their victories coming by double- digit margins. The only narrow win in that span was a 55-50 decision against No. 12 Purdue. The defending NCAA champion Boilermakers had won 25 in a row against Big Ten foes and 21 in a row at Mackey Arena, but the Lady Lions got 14 points from Garner and held off a late comeback bid by the hosts. "It's been a long time since we've won here, a long time since we beat Purdue," coach Rene Portland said after watching her team end a five-game losing streak to the Boilermakers. "We established our inside game early, and our high-low post was really effective." Penn State did slip up against Michigan State, falling to the unranked Spartans, 71-63, on Jan. 23. But it regrouped with wins over Michigan (85-71, Jan. 27) and Wisconsin (68-54, Jan. 30) and headed into February on top of the league stand- ings and ranked sixth in the Associated Press poll. — Matt Herb This Month In Penn State Athletics History Guard D.J. Newbill averaged a team-high 20.7 points per game during the 2014-15 season, his last campaign at Penn State. PHOTO BY STEVE MANUEL