Success with Hyperlinking is Celebrating Top Ten Teams

Penn State is tearing it up right now in Fall sports with 5 teams ranked in the Top-10 nationally. Aside from football (#4), the women’s volleyball (#2), field hockey (#3), women’s soccer (#7), and women’s cross country (#9) are all having successful seasons so far. With 5 teams in the top ten, Penn State is currently tied with Stanford for the most Top-10 sports teams in the nation.

Barton Simmons at CBS Sports views Penn State’s upcoming match-up against Iowa as a trap game. He, too, must be scarred from frustrating defeats versus the Hawkeyes in the 2000’s, because his comparison between Penn State and last year’s Michigan team doesn’t seem very logical. Other than being highly-ranked and playing on the road, Penn State and Michigan have very different playing styles highlighted by Nittany Lions having an offense with a pulse. Still, Akrum Wadley poses a threat to Penn State’s defense, and Iowa has plenty of motivation to avenge an embarrassing performance last year in State College. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a trap game though.

PennLive’s Bob Flounders is asking the important question regarding Saturday’s game: Is Iowa prepared to stop Penn State’s two-QB formation? Up to this point it’s hard to tell if Moorhead’s use of this formation has been a ploy to complicate the game-plans of opposing defensive coordinators, or if he plans to use it regularly in close games. Tommy Stevens famously scored on a jet-sweep in last year’s meeting between the two teams, and I predict that he’ll finally throw a pass out of the two-QB formation this week.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette breaks down the match-up from a Hawkeye point of view with some excellent quotes from head coach Kirk Ferentz about last year’s rout. “The only thing we might have been all right with last year would be the coin toss, and I’d have to look that up,” Ferentz said. “We probably lost that, too. There wasn’t much out of that tape we can take.”