Ticketcity Bowl

Penn State discovered Sunday what it had feared since former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted last month on child sexual-abuse charges - that bowl committees would be reluctant to invite the Nittany Lions because of the controversy associated with the scandal. Although they finished tied for the fourth-best record in the Big Ten this season at 9-3, the Nittany Lions had to wait until the TicketCity Bowl, the seventh of the games affiliated with the conference to select, chose them for its Jan. 2 game at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

DALLAS - The stage will be set Monday for Penn State quarterback Rob Bolden as - after a two-month hiatus from a meaningful snap - the sophomore will get a shot to start and finish the TicketCity Bowl. On Sunday, Penn State interim coach Tom Bradley officially ruled out starting quarterback Matt McGloin for Monday's game against Houston after McGloin did not pass concussion tests needed to clear him for action. Walk-on Shane McGregor will serve as Bolden's backup. "I think he's done very well," Bradley said of Bolden at the TicketCity Bowl news conference, where he shared the podium with Houston coach Tony Levine.

DALLAS - Penn State players and coaches chose not to point to the events of the last two months - a horrible scandal, three bowl snubs, a fight that sidelined its starting quarterback and the interminable search for a new head coach - as a reason for a lackluster performance Monday in the TicketCity Bowl. But the Nittany Lions played the first quarter against Houston as if they left their focus back at the hotel or in State College. And the offense, without junior Matt McGloin, never found a footing the entire game with sophomore Rob Bolden at the controls.

Houston vs. Penn State, TicketCity Bowl; Jan. 2, noon at the Cotton Bowl, Dallas; ESPNU Nickname: Cougars. Location: Houston. Record/finish: 12-1 overall, 8-1 Conference USA; lost conference title game to Southern Mississippi. Coach: Kevin Sumlin, fourth season, 35-17. Top rusher: Charles Sims, 782 yards, nine touchdowns. Top passer: Case Keenum, 5,099 yards, 45 touchdowns. Top receiver: Patrick Edwards, 79 catches, 1,524 yards, 18 touchdowns.

SOME OF THE more wildly optimistic projections have been scaled back, but representatives of Penn State and the TicketCity Bowl remain confident the school will be well-represented by blue-clad fans when the Nittany Lions take on Houston on Jan. 2 in Dallas. A few days after the pairing of the 9-3 Lions and 12-1 Cougars was announced on Dec. 4, an ecstatic Tom Starr, president and CEO of the second-year TicketCity Bowl, predicted a turnout of 55,000-plus in the historic, 92,000-seat Cotton Bowl, a significant uptick from the 38,274 who showed up for the inaugural event, in which Texas Tech outlasted Northwestern, 45-38.

THERE ARE two ways to look at the second annual TicketCity Bowl pairing of Penn State (9-3) and Houston (12-1) on Jan. 2. The glass-is-half-empty view is that this is a disappointing, second-tier game for both the Nittany Lions and the Cougars, to be played in an historic but ancient stadium, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The glass-is-half-full outlook, though, is that two teams that had hoped for more prestigious, better-paying postseason destinations nonetheless lucked into a contest that could turn out to be very intriguing.

DALLAS - The Penn State football team's imminent arrival for the TicketCity Bowl has caught the attention of the Dallas-area's child-advocacy community but is not likely to lead to any protests, leaders of several area organizations said. The 24th-ranked Nittany Lions, scheduled to travel to Dallas on Dec. 26 to prepare for their matchup with No. 20 Houston on Jan. 2 at the Cotton Bowl, have become a lightning rod for criticism and controversy since accusations of child sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky surfaced in November.

WHILE THE PENN State campus continues to mourn the loss of Joe Paterno, the business of college football recruiting rolls on. The Nittany Lions received a verbal commitment from Cairo (Ga.) High School quarterback Steven Bench. The 6-3, 206-pound Bench originally had given a verbal to Rice. "The thing about playing in front of 100,000 people, is that it kind of sounds like its almost exaggerated a bit," Bench told BlueWhiteIllustrated.com. "But just the fact that I'll get the opportunity to do that is just a dream come true almost.

PENN STATE linebackers coach Ron Vanderlinden was unsmiling and tight-lipped as he emerged from a 10-minute emergency team meeting late Saturday afternoon at the Lasch Football Building. "It's good to be a Nittany Lion," Vanderlinden said, as he hurried past reporters who were hoping to get some insight into the latest incident that has turned the school's hallowed football program into an ongoing soap opera. Already reeling from the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, the shocking firing of iconic coach Joe Paterno on Nov. 9 and the drawn-out process of selecting a permanent successor to Paterno, Penn State was jolted by a postpractice fistfight between starting quarterback Matt McGloin and wide receiver Curtis Drake, which reportedly began on the field as an argument over who was responsible for a busted pass play and escalated once it reached the locker room.

Kain Colter is a quarterback, a running back, and a wide receiver, and that's fitting because opposing defenses swear they are chasing three guys whenever he's on the field. Colter is not a big man at 6 feet and 190 pounds, but the Northwestern junior has become one of the ultimate weapons in the Big Ten Conference, able to make a big play at any time at any of the three positions. When the 24th-ranked Wildcats meet Penn State on Saturday at Beaver Stadium, the Nittany Lions will have to identify where No. 2 is at all times in their opponent's up-tempo offense.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Some pigskin pundits are obsessed with establishing a running game and controlling the clock. They say those are the keys to victory. But that approach is rarely a key against a hard-to-run-on team like Penn State. Houston, in last season's TicketCity Bowl, and Ohio, in this season's opener, displayed a blueprint to beat the Nittany Lions. Temple might want to consider the formula in Saturday's game at Beaver Stadium. Both teams spread the field, sped up the game, and attacked Penn State's secondary.

Shawney Kersey had carried on a somewhat strange relationship with Penn State ever since he was recruited out of Woodbury High School by Joe Paterno's staff. After a redshirt year and two rather idle seasons on the Paterno-coached Nittany Lions, maybe Kersey thought he would enjoy a rebirth with new coach Bill O'Brien after a good spring and preseason, and starts in the first two games of 2012. But any good feelings were short-lived. O'Brien announced Wednesday, via Penn State football's Twitter feed, that Kersey had left the team for personal reasons.

He walked on at Penn State after no major football program offered him a scholarship. He spent each of the previous two seasons as a major character in the Nittany Lions' never-ending quarterback drama. Now, on Saturday, in his fifth season with the team, Matt McGloin will take the initial snap of Penn State's new football season for the first time. "It's a great feeling," McGloin said Wednesday. "It shows you that your hard work in the spring and the summer has paid off. This is what you play for, for 12 Saturdays out of the year.

THE JACKHAMMERS did their work quickly, by all accounts. The cement that moored the Joe Paterno statue to its foundation broke easily. It had to come down, and on a summer Sunday morning it did come down, and there really should not have been a debate; false idols, etc. If only the rest were that easy. The NCAA comes on Monday. An organization that has most often stood for all that was good and holy and profitable in college athletics — and not necessarily in that order — is set to pronounce sentence on the Penn State football program.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - After losing four starters to graduation following the 2011 season, Penn State coaches have had to make some position changes to a secondary that was seriously lacking in depth. In the beginning of the spring, sophomore Adrian Amos was moved from cornerback to safety, and redshirt sophomore Curtis Drake, from West Catholic High, was moved from wide receiver/wildcat quarterback to cornerback. Though Drake didn't play in Saturday's Blue-White game at Beaver Stadium with what head coach Bill O'Brien called a shin problem, he and Amos will be a part of one of the most inexperienced secondaries the Lions have had in some time.

INDIANAPOLIS - The NFL combine is all about looking toward the future, but Penn State products have spent much of their time with the media looking back on their tumultuous last season. "Everything got overshadowed," said defensive tackle Devon Still, a likely first-round pick in April's draft. "When it first happened it was hard to believe just because it snuck up on us. Seeing Coach [Joe] Paterno fired and then a couple months later seeing him pass away, it was hard on us. " Defensive end Jack Crawford said it was difficult for some of the team to embrace their TicketCity Bowl bid at the end of the season.

WHILE THE PENN State campus continues to mourn the loss of Joe Paterno, the business of college football recruiting rolls on. The Nittany Lions received a verbal commitment from Cairo (Ga.) High School quarterback Steven Bench. The 6-3, 206-pound Bench originally had given a verbal to Rice. "The thing about playing in front of 100,000 people, is that it kind of sounds like its almost exaggerated a bit," Bench told BlueWhiteIllustrated.com. "But just the fact that I'll get the opportunity to do that is just a dream come true almost.

When Penn State acting athletic director Dave Joyner last met with the team's beat reporters during TicketCity Bowl week, he was asked whether he needed to hire a "home-run candidate" to replace iconic Joe Paterno as the Nittany Lions' head football coach. "It depends on how you judge a home run," Joyner said. "I judge it by getting the person that has those qualities that we're used to in the university. I think if we get somebody that reflects the values at this university for a long time and the football program in particular, then I feel like we hit a home run. " So whether Joyner, chairman of the search committee, believes he has that home-run candidate in New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien isn't known, because he passed on two opportunities - going into and coming out of a meeting with the current coaching staff at the Lasch Football Building at Penn State - to speak on the subject Friday.

DALLAS - A season of tragedy and upheaval finally came to an end for Penn State football Monday in a third-rate bowl game played in a half-empty stadium that also has seen much better days. There wasn't much of a final reward for the Nittany Lions players who endured the fallout from the Jerry Sandusky scandal this season. They very nearly voted to turn down this invitation from the TicketCity Bowl after being bypassed by several bowls further up the pecking order. The better bowls with Big Ten Conference affiliation thought Penn State's distressing season would keep its normally loyal fans from traveling, and they apparently were right.