Fallout continues

Anger over Penn State’s performance against Illinois is spreading like Herpes on Paris Hilton. The disgust is almost unanimously focused on the offensive line and its horrible play the last two games. Paterno had a lot of bad things to say about the line when asked after the game.

We were just lousy. I don’t want to get into an examination of why. We were lousy today. I’ve got to go home, take a look at some tapes, look at so things and evaluate some people. We were lousy, ok. I mean, what else can I say?

Q: …do you think some defenses are doing some different things?

No, we’re just lousy. Can I get that across? It’s spelled l-o-u-s-y.

Q: Can you attribute the fact that you were lousy to maybe a letdown after the Michigan game?

I don’t know how you can have a letdown when you’ve lost three games and you’re trying to have a good year. I don’t know. If you have a letdown, you’re not much of a football player. I don’t have anything good to say, guys, so we’re all just wasting our time…I’m not very happy.

Penn State fans have pretty much given the offense all the slack it is going to get. At first the offense had little problems moving the ball, but difficulty scoring; now they can’t even move the ball against a less-then-stellar defense. I like Levi Brown, but he just isn’t cutting it as a captain. The offensive line had a emergency meeting immediately after the game and it appears that it was an excuse gathering party from Brown’s comments.

We came out flat in the first half. They came at us with a lot of blitzes. We weren't ready to pick them up. The first half was pretty bad for us. We are prepared to play, but I don’t think we got ourselves mentally ready to go out there and dominate like we needed to.

The coaches must have seen the horrible effort early on as they inserted Gerald Cadogan for Price and Chris Auletta for John Shaw, which Brown was quick to note:

It's tough when guys are being switched in and out constantly. You can't get into a groove. Maybe a lot of guys are feeling if I mess up they're going to take me out. A lot of people are starting to blitz more and bring more guys into the box. Most of the time, there will be one guy free. When a guy gets off the block, it's going to be a poor play or a loss of yardage.

I understand that a leader has to defend his team to the media, but ignoring the problems and making excuses isn’t going to cut it, especially given the fact that even the most casual fan can see the glaring weakness is the offensive line. If Levi Brown is going to make anything out of the rest of his Senior year he better take the bull by the horns and do something about it instead of making excuses. After all, that is the captain’s job.