Blue White Illustrated

JUDGMENT CALL SHOVEL READY PSU making improvements, on the field and off T he scoreboard project seemed to be coming along quite nicely as of mid-December over at Beaver Stadium. Curtain Road had been blocked off and a crane set up behind the stadium's southern entrance to help dismantle the guts of the antiquated system that had been sitting atop the upper deck since 2001. When the project is finished – the road will be shut down through the end of January and the new system is expected to be ready in time for Penn State's home opener against Akron on Sept. 6 – the Nittany Lions' home field will be bathed in a shimmering aura of high-def LED goodness. The football team appears to be doing its part, too. Concerns about whether the Lions would produce their share of scoreboard-worthy moments in 2014 were to some degree allayed by their performance in the season finale at Wisconsin, a 31-24 upset victory in which Christian Hackenberg threw four touchdown passes, all to guys who will be returning next season. The Lions had been 24-point underdogs, and while they had said in the days leading up to the game that they weren't bothered by the Vegas line or by the many pro-Wisconsin predictions in the local media, they admitted afterward that they were a bit more irritated than they had let on. Maybe more than a bit. As one support staffer said to a cluster of reporters while he jogged off the field, "Thanks for the motivation, guys. " The Lions' performance in Madison was the highlight of their season, and on a slow news day, it might have sent a tremor through the college football landscape. But Nov. 30, 2013, was not a slow news day. A lot of reporters in the press box at Camp Randall Stadium missed the Penn State-Wisconsin kickoff because they were watching Michigan attempt a game-deciding two-point conversion against Ohio State. And as dramatic as that moment was, it paled in comparison to Auburn's upset victory over No. 1 Alabama later that night, easily college football's game of the year, maybe its game of the decade. When SportsCenter finally aired after a day of ridiculously high drama, Penn State's upset victory had been relegated to the middle of the college football roundup, its highlights outnumbered by amateur videos that ESPN had culled from YouTube of fans watching the Alabama-Auburn game at home on TV. And maybe that's appropriate. If 2012 was the year that Penn State made headlines, defiantly announcing to the world that it wasn't just going to sink into the smoldering debris left behind by the Sandusky scandal, 2013 was the year in which it quietly undertook the hard and often unglamorous work of rebuilding – both as a football program and, more important, as a university. For the football program, that meant transitioning more completely from one coaching era to the next. In 2012, Bill O'Brien made the most of a roster he had inherited, turning Matt McGloin, Allen Robinson and Kyle Carter among others into stars. This past season, the chemistry was a bit different. Holdover players still made up the majority of the two-deep, but some of the team's most

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