The Lion in Autumn by Frank Fitzpatrick

Author:Frank Fitzpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

After Robinson left the field, Paterno immediately told Galen Hall to eliminate most of the plays they had drawn up that week. Then, surprisingly, he turned not to Morelli, who he had said two weeks ago was being primed for just such an occurrence, but to third-string QB Chris Ganter. Paterno told the son of his longtime assistant to keep it simple. Ganter, a fourth-year junior, was brave but ineffective in the longest exposure of his career.

“I really thought about playing Morelli a couple of times,” Paterno would say. “In fact, Jay Paterno and I talked about that in the second half. Neither he nor Chris Ganter got a lot of reps during the week. It’s tough to get three quarterbacks ready. We really had to change a lot of things we’d planned to do. We weren’t comfortable that Anthony would be familiar with a lot of the things because we hadn’t been practicing them a lot during the week.”

Just about the only noteworthy development for an offense that managed just one field goal was the debut of Mark Rubin. The possession receiver from Amherst, New York, had a pair of catches for 21 yards. More significantly, he became the fifth true freshman Paterno had played this fall.

Defensively, the Nittany Lions again played well enough to win. They shut down the Badgers’ passing game but couldn’t contain their running game in the second half. What was somewhat embarrassing was that the bulk of the damage was done by a 270-pound fullback who rarely carried the ball and who had been fasting for twenty-four hours. Matt Bernstein became Barry Alvarez’s top option after in-game injuries to Jamil Walker and Booker Stanley. Wisconsin already was without top back Anthony Davis, who sat out the game with an eye injury.

Bernstein had attended Yom Kippur services with his family Friday and, in approximate observance of the holiday’s mandate to fast from sundown to sundown, didn’t eat between 4:45 P.M. the previous day and just after kickoff, when he had turkey and orange slices. Fortunately for the Badgers, the relatively late kickoff had permitted him to play.

He carried the ball twenty-seven times for 129 yards, most of it in the second half as Wisconsin mercifully killed the clock against the depleted Lions in a 16–3 victory that left the Badgers with a 4–0 record.

Penn State was 2–2, 0–1 in a conference in which they now had lost nineteen of their previous thirty-three games.

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