Hello from an LSU fan.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re just returning the favor.

we replied with “scoreboard”

I’ll leave it to someone like jtothep to actually post about the skills of individual players (is it spelled Stankewitch?), I’m a little ignorant there, but the gist is that our offensive line has been good enough to get us to 10 wins, bad enough to get manhandled by Iowa and Ohio State.

If I were LSU, I would blitz, blitz, blitz. I don’t trust our ability to pick up fast blitzers or to throw quick passes to neutralize the blitzing.

How good is your secondary, and corners in particular? Our WRs were shut down by Iowa and Ohio State’s bump and run coverage.

Sexy! Don’t forget that.

/smartass off….I do agree. Tiger Stadium would be a fun, fun place to see a game sometime. I’m bummed, tho, my wife’s Baton Rouge friends just split up, so my connection there kinda disappeared.

Maybe we could pair up Lou Holtz and JoePa to do the announcing/commentary.

i admit that I’m skeptical of Big 10 teams claimaing they have the speed to keep up with SEC teams. Ohio State said much the same thing prior to our game with them. I’ll have to take a wait and see on that one.

We’re not Ohio State. Neither is Michigan or Iowa (you may remember them, Drew Tate, Jonathan Babineaux, Matt Roth, etc). Tennessee said the same thing about us. Penn State has always had fast linebackers. Penn State has had fast, smart defensive linemen since Larry Johnson, SR took over. Hell, we now run an offense that is predicated more on speed than power, in my view. And importantly, speed is just one of many facets of the game. An SEC team’s fast skill players don’t matter when Jared Odrick or Jay Alford or Lou Benfatti or Courtney Brown is sacking the quarterback.

As for Paterno and “hands on coaching”, he injured his knee last year while demonstrating to his kicker the proper technique for an onside kick. FWIW.

The key is you have to get pressure out of your base defense without too much blitzing. Teams that have slowed our offense down with a scheme, usually get beat badly in the second half after the offense tweaks the game plan. If your defensive line can consitently physically dominate our offensive line, you’ll win. Otherwise, we’ll score 25 points, and that should be plenty for our defense given what you indicated.

USC did not out “athlete” Penn State. Mark Sanchez threw darts for the entire second quarter by throwing on time while beating a pretty intense pash rush but a pretty small margain. They spent the first quarter skeptical of our athletes and didn’t do much of anything. It was skill that beat us, not speed.

I don’t much concern myself with who does the coaching. But there aren’t too many teams that are more fundamentally sound than Penn State. Not to ruffle to many feathers on your end, but LSU isn’t one of them. Penn State has about two centuries worth of coaching experience on the sideline, and it’s a group that above all other things, is pretty good at winning bowl games.

I’m pretty confident that Penn State would put on a pretty good show against LSU. I am concerned that we won’t be able to handle your defensive line, as I suspect it’s probably a little better than advertised, even if it’s dissapointing by your normal standards.

Also, we’ve got awful special teams. If we can’t get that corrected, all bets are off.