While Penn State didn’t play football this weekend there still was plenty of news in both other sports and on the pigskin front. In the middle of the “Ken – remember this?” thread, right after Gary questioned my comment about PSU being in the middle of the national championship picture, I documented three things that needed to happen for PSU to get into the national championship game (well, three things out of their control, four things if you count beating Michigan State as one of the requirements). Well one of them happened as Alabama went down to defeat at the hands of LSU, so now Penn State sits fourth in the BCS standings. That leaves two to go with three weeks of football left.
One sports season came to an end on Saturday. The 8th ranked Penn State women’s field hockey team went down to defeat to 6th ranked American University in NCAA playoff action.
Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year Natalie Berrena scored the first goal of the game to give the Nits a 1-0 lead but American came back with 3 straight goals and eventually won 3-2 eliminating the Nits from the NCAA tournament.
The girls’ loss turned out to be JR Mangan’s gain. Immediately following the game held at the University of Maryland, the team returned to State College where Natalie was able to join her band “JR and Natalie” for their second and third sets at the Cafe 210 here in State College. This time, Uncle Larry finally remembered to bring his camera and caught the band in action. This is my favorite shot from the batch. 🙂
The women’s volleyball team swept two matchs over the weekend, sweeping both Purdue and Illinois. With the Illinois win, the girls clinched their third straight and ninth overall Big Ten title.
Speaking of Big Ten titles, the men’s soccer team added the Big Ten Tournament title to their regular season title by shutting out both Michigan State 2-0 and defending national champion Indiana 1-0. Indiana had been the #2 ranked team in the county coming into the game. They had lost only one game all year – not so coincidently that game was to Penn State and it happened on national TV in Bloomington. This is the first time ever that Penn State has beaten traditional national power Indiana twice in a season. The Nits also own a win over #1 ranked Maryland so they must be considered a force to be reckoned with during the NCAA tournament which starts this weekend (Penn State will find out who their opponent is when the pairings are announced at 5PM today – UPDATE: PSU received a ninth seed, thus earning a first round bye and will host the Hartwick/Seton Hall winner on Tuesday Nov 22nd). The two B10 titles capped an unbelievable turnaround for this team which lost 5 and tied 1 in their first six games of the season. At the beginning of October this team had 3 wins 7 losses and 2 ties. Since then they have won TEN in a row and are a legitimate threat to win the national title – nobody is playing as well as they are right now.
And while we are on the subject of NCAA soccer we can’t overlook the PSU women. As a result of their loss in the Big Ten tournament the women slipped to #3 overall in the national soccer rankings. However, they have bounced right back and have already defeated two opponents, Bucknell 6-0, and West Virginia 5-2. The girls will now meet Texas A&M in Sweet Sixteen at a site TBD.
The four B10 wins over the weekend brought our fall sports overall B10 record to 45-3. We have now totalled five B10 championships (four regular season crowns and one tournament crown) and can bring the total to six with a win over Michigan State by the football team this weekend. Quite a successful Fall and certainly worthy of an entry in the “Legends of the Falls” (pun intended) Blog.