Blue-White ’08

The craziness of Blue-White Weekend 2008 is finally over. Maybe tonight won’t be filled with the sounds of drunk people being loud outside, cars without mufflers drag racing down area streets, intermittent fireworks/firecrackers, or occasional emergency sirens. The fairly steady rain today and tonight has no doubt put a bit of a damper on such activities, in addition to it being a school night. 🙂
I went to the annual Blue-White Game on Saturday with Tracy, Kerrie & Dan, and it was a gorgeous day out, mid-upper 70s and partly sunny skies, a great day to sit back and watch some football. It was a record crowd for Blue-White Weekend too, with an estimated 73,000 fans taking advantage of the free admission to watch the game. It’s just a glorified practice basically (think about that for a minute… our fans are so hard-core that 73,000 people showed up to watch a practice), but it’s still fun to get a sneak peek at some of the players for the team that’ll be on the field in 2008. One of the most interesting things to watch for was the battle for the starting QB position, between Daryll Clark and Pat Devlin. I came away pretty impressed with both, and it sure seems like whichever one gets the nod as the starting quarterback, or if they platoon at QB during the season (which I’d advocate, until one starts outplaying the other), they’ll be better than what we had with Anthony Morelli the last two years. As thoroughly mediocre as Anthony Morelli was though, I thought it was pretty classless for the fans to boo him at halftime during some awards ceremony. Come on people, he’s not playing anymore, get over it. And it’s not like he tried to suck or make all those dumb decisions. But anyway, back to the game. The other really fun thing to see was how good our running backs look. On the third play of the game for the White team, redshirt freshman Stephfon Green took a pitch to the left side, made a move and was gone 57 yards up the sideline for a touchdown. Holy cow is he fast! It’ll be fun cheering on Stephfon for the coming seasons too, because he was one of Heather’s students last semester in her English 15 class, and she said he’s a really good kid and everything. But anyway, Penn State’s offense looked really good, definitely better than the last couple years in the Blue-White Game, that’s for sure. Hopefully that bodes well for their ability to score points this coming season. 🙂 But perhaps the coolest part of going to the game was that they let the public out onto the field after the game, to walk around and take pictures and whatnot! It was awesome to get the chance to walk around on the highly-manicured turf of Beaver Stadium, and just look up in amazement at how enormous and imposing the stadium is when you’re down on the field. Seriously, it must be intimidating to have 110,000 screaming fans on top of you like that. It makes me even more pumped to go to the games this fall!
To round out the Blue-White festivities, Kerrie had quite a few people over for a cookout and a game night. I had to leave for a couple hours in the middle of it though, because of worship band rehearsal at the church. But I did make it back in time for some Apples to Apples and some other fun taboo/charades-like game. I was pretty tired (and fortunately not very sunburned) by the end of the day, that’s for sure.
Only a couple days till the Pennsylvania Primaries and the end of all the political ads on TV (for a little while, anyway). I guess I should figure out who I’m gonna vote for, particularly in the PA 5th district US House race, which has gotten particularly nasty over the last couple weeks. I don’t think I’m gonna vote for either Shaner or Walker in that race, just because somebody’s lying in that whole ugly spat (or both are lying), and I don’t wanna pick the wrong one in the primary. And besides, if I can’t find another candidate from the other seven that are running for that seat in the GOP, then that’d be pretty sad. I need to educate myself about all the local races too, so I don’t go into the voting booth blind. Hooray representative democracy!