Week 10 Awards

It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s yet again time for awards!  This week’s awards were a little tricky because of the team’s inconsistent play against Illinois.  A guy like Jordan Lucas, for example, deserves some recognition for his interception that halted an Illinois scoring drive dead in its tracks.  However, getting beat by receivers all night negates that one great achievement.  Overall, everyone will have to play better if Penn State hopes to knock off a surging Minnesota team on the road this week.  With all that said, let’s roll out the awards!

This week’s Beast Mode Award should be fairly obvious.  It goes to Bill Belton who ran for 201 yds on a personal best 36 carries becoming the first PSU running back to break the 200 yd mark in over a decade!  The shy junior from NJ is the first to deflect praise away from himself, but that won’t stop me from recognizing him in my weekly awards.  Congrats Belton!

The Transformer Award this week goes to punter Alex Butterworth, whose incredible acting prowess, drawing a “running into the kicker” penalty, prolonged a stalled drive.  Although the numbers don’t show it, he is also transforming his game by getting much better at pinning opponents deep in their own territory.  We’ll need that field position later in the season against teams like Nebraska and Wisconsin.

This week’s winner of the Matrix Award is getting used to winning awards multiple times, and this is no exception.  Once again it goes to Christian Hackenberg.  We finally got to see the young quarterback try his hand at running the ball with amazing results as he scored a rushing TD in addition to his passing TD.  He also didn't throw an interception all game!  Oh, and he was named the Athlon Sports Big Ten Freshman of the Week for the second time this season.  Keep it up Hack!

The unsung hero of the game and winner of the In Disguise Award is Jesse Della Valle.  While the rest of the secondary was sleeping, Della Valle was quietly having himself a great game with numerous pass break ups and hard hits.  The stats don’t tell the story of his impact on the game, mostly because ESPN’s website literally says “defensive stats not considered to be official.”  Um, what?!

Finally, the Megatron Award this week should be pretty obvious: PENALTIES!  Overall, Penn State had 11 total penalties for a loss of 95 yds.  At least 5 of those were personal fouls costing the team 15 yds each.  The worst came in OT when Jesse James was called for something ridiculous and Bill Belton’s TD was taken off the scoreboard.  Hackenberg would throw a TD to Kyle Carter on the very next play, but that could have been disastrous.  Penalties killed Penn State (ironically the least penalized team in the league before this game) all night long.  They better clean up their act by Saturday afternoon.

Well that’ll wrap things up for this week’s game.  Penn State travels to Minneapolis for a noon kickoff against the Golden Gophers on Saturday.  No word on if head coach Jerry Kill will be on the sidelines or up in the press box, but even without him Minnesota has rattled off 3 straight Big Ten wins and looks to make Penn State victim number 4.  But we’ll talk about that more in Friday’s prediction.  Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @PSUOptimus, and as always, go State!