Fourth-and-1 at the Temple 3-yard line.  High anxiety.  A 1-2 start looming. On the previous play fullback Michael Zordich recovered a loose snap dropped by quarterback Rob Bolden to help prevent an upset.  Visions of past fourth-and-1 debacles danced through anxious heads.  Penn State took a timeout and debated – Jay and Joe up in the coaches' box and frantic wired assistants on the field.  The field-goal team –  0-for 3 with one blocked and two missed including one that clanged off the right goalpost with 10:42 left – would go back out, right?

“We had the fourth down and about a half a yard to go,” Joe Paterno recalled at his weekly press conference Tuesday.  “Everybody wanted to kick the ball except Jay Paterno.

We would have kicked that ball if it wasn't for Jay. Jay said, 'No, we'll put it in –  we'll get it in.'  And he said something to the quarterbacks about, 'Hey, you tell those guys they’ve got to get it in.' And we got it in.”

Penn State got the first-and-goal at the 1 on running back Brandon Beachum's second effort through a Temple defense that has allowed only 24 points in 3 games. Then Zordich bulled into the end zone at 2:42 to break Temple's hearts after the Owls had controlled the game –
and the Cherry and White crowd – for the previous 57 minutes 18 seconds.

Temple (2-1) was finally stopped by a sack with 61 seconds left after reaching the Penn State 34. After trailing by 10-7 at halftime,  the Penn State defense allowed only 71 net yards.
 
“And then we came up with the interception,” Paterno said Tuesday, recalling  linebacker Michael Mauti's play that led to the winning drive. “So there's things we're doing better, yeah. But I'm not trying to get up here and tell you I'm completely pleased with the way we're going, but we're certainly a lot better than some of you think.”

The winning drive started with 8:46 to play at the Temple 44. On third-and-7 at the 41, Bolden connected with Devon Smith for 10 yards for a first down at the 31. On third-and-6 at the 27, Bolden hit grieving tight end Andrew Szczerba for 4 yards for a first down at the 23. [Early Friday, Szczerba's uncle, New Castle County (Del.) police Sgt. Joseph Szczerba, was fatally stabbed by a suspect.] Two runs by Beachum earned the third-and-2 at the 4. But Bolden lost the snap before Zordich recovered, gaining a yard, and prevented Temple from beating Penn State  for the first time since Oct. 18, 1941. “I nearly had a heart attack,” Bolden said.

Using Bolden in the final drive as co-quarterback Matt McGloin sat talking to the coaches
on a headset and dangling his cleats near the Penn State bench may have indicated who the starter will be. Right?

Wrong, Paterno said Tuesday. “I don't know what I'm waiting for. I think both those kids are so close and both those kids deserve to play. One of these days I would like to be able to say, 'Hey, we are going to play one quarterback.' But I want to be fair.  I want to be fair to the team. Half the time I don't think they even know who is at quarterback.  I don't get any negative feedback about either one of those kids. They do everything you ask them to do. And it's very difficult for me to tell you 'so and so' is better than the other one. And so I don't know. Maybe I'm making a mistake in not deciding. I'm not comfortable with it. But I also wouldn't be comfortable if I did something that I felt ended up being unfair to one.”

Later he elaborated: “This is a seat-of-the-pants kind of situation I'm in right now. I've got a feel on the thing. And I'm a little bit at a disadvantage because I'm upstairs. So who should be in there at that time? Mac seemed like he was doing well.  I talked to a couple of the assistant coaches. They were enthusiastic that that group that was in there at that particular time would get the job done. Is that scientific? No, it ain't scientific. If everything we did in life we’ve got to do by the numbers, who knows, I might be a newspaper guy.”

So why has the offense struggled in the past two games?

''Obviously, Alabama is a very good defensive team, and I thought Temple played really well,” Paterno said. “We’ve got to do better, no question about it. We hurt ourselves. We had four major penalties which were careless; that hurt us when we had the ball offensively. But I think when you look at the tapes of the Temple game, so many times when we looked in there, there would be seven, eight, nine guys with red uniforms on top of the guy. They (Temple) really hustled, played well. That's a good team.  Of course, Alabama is a good solid defensive football team. So, I think we're struggling. We have to get better, but we're probably not as bad as most people think.”

As Bernard Fernandez reported in The Philadelphia Daily News, “Out of the 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Lions rank 103rd in yards per game (306), tied for 90th in points per game (22) and 106th in passing yards per game (158). They are one of only six teams  –  Florida Atlantic, Alabama-Birmingham, San Jose State, Oregon State and Central Florida are the others –  which have yet to be credited with a touchdown pass. Imagine how low those numbers might be were it not for the season-opening, 41-7 rout of Indiana State.”

Is going 12 quarters without a touchdown pass a record for Penn State?

Paterno deflected concern about being ready for the Big Ten in two weeks, saying: “We're taking every game one at a time. I think we've got to just try to get better as a football team each game we play.”

Ron English, the head coach of Saturday's home opponent, Eastern Michigan, said Penn State's offense was as predictable as it was when he was a Michigan assistant to Lloyd Carr from 2003-7 in five games against Paterno and his offensive coordinator Galen Hall.

"Penn State doesn't change much over the years," English said.  "I see them running very similar plays to what they always have. I know philosophically what they want to do." He said Penn State's style was to "play good, sound offensive football, to not turn the ball over, to run the ball and to throw it a little bit, too."

“I'm not going to disagree with him,” Paterno said.  “But I think there comes a point when you're coaching, you know that people are playing you for certain tendencies and you adjust to them and you're ready to adjust to them, and we have been.  That doesn't concern me.”   

Paterno did not blame the offensive line for the erratic offense.  “You can't blame the offensive line for some major penalties we had,” Paterno said Tuesday. “Get a 70(52)-yard pass, pass for touchdown, got a penalty. We had two unnecessary roughness penalties. Just flagrant. They were absolutely careless. That's a lack of discipline on the part of a couple of kids that we've got to re-emphasize with them that there's no place for that stuff. You can't win doing that kind of nonsense.  You have four major penalties and, as I said earlier, mess around with the kicking game the way we did, be ineffective in that area, you're not going to have a lot of consistency.”

And the kicking game uncharacteristically faltered.  Temple blocked Anthony Fera's punt attempt in the third quarter. On an earlier play in the series, a penalty negated a 52-yard apparent touchdown pass.  At his postgame news conference Paterno tried to humor Fera's blocked punt.  “(He) just took too long. He caught the ball, took a look at it to make sure it was a football, and then he kicked it."  Tuesday, Paterno was crticial, saying: “That was just absolute carelessness. I think he just got a little bit nonchalant and hadn't been hurt (earlier) and that kid came up and blocked it. I thought on the blocked field goal we might have been just a little bit slow.”

THREE AND OUT: Wishing Pitt and Syracuse well for joining the ACC, Paterno said ''there might be even some speculation that Penn State maybe ought to get into something different, or we ought to try to go out and get some people from the East to come into the Big Ten, that we maybe ought to solicit (Big Ten Commissioner) Jim Delany and some of the leaders of the Big Ten, (and say,) “Why don't we take a look at Rutgers?” and take a look at somebody that we can bring in from the East so that the Big Ten doesn't end in State College. I've been trying since Day One to try to get some other school in the East in the Big Ten, because I think there's a tremendous market for recruiting and football in the area that the schools are moving into. Fifty million people live in the areas that we're talking about and awful lot of kids playing football and all sports.” … Friday night, Paterno reunited with Wayne Hardin, a College Football Hall of Fame nominee and former Navy and Temple coach. They coached three Heisman Trophy winners: Hardin with Joe Bellino in 1958 and Roger Staubach in 1963, and Paterno with John Cappelletti in 1972. When Hardin was at Temple, he lost three games to Penn State by a total of 5 points. … Explaining the quick-count offense that sometimes did not surprise defenses, Paterno said: “Temple did a good job, as did Alabama; kept changing up on us. If I put the Alabama pictures (video) up here, you would see they played it two deep, until the very last moment; they were quick enough they could come up there as the ball was being snapped, change the whole defensive scheme. So you start going on quick to make them show it quicker. Then obviously you've got to take what you called in the huddle. It's a chess game out there.  I'm not up here crying about it. That's part of the game.”