Friday, December 16, 2016
If timing is everything, how important is bad timing?
We’ll find out Saturday night, when the Youngstown State football team will try to extend its best season in a decade.
Wait. What?
You mean the Penguins are actually going to play the FCS national semifinal against Eastern Washington and not just concede?
Surely you can’t think that YSU (11-3) — expected to be without several suspended players — has any shot against EWU (13-1), the tournament’s second-seeded team.
Some observers counted out the Penguins when word surfaced this week that as many as four starters — two on both side of the ball — and perhaps another significant contributor wouldn’t be after apparently failing random drug tests after a second-round playoff win over Jacksonville State on Dec. 3.
One of the players, senior running back Martin Ruiz, has been identified as by multiple sources as one of the suspended players. Ruiz sat out the first half against Wofford last Saturday and had only one carry in YSU’s 30-23 double-overtime victory. That apparently was the result of his Dec. 6 arrest in by Tallmadge police on felony weapons charges.
YSU officials haven’t publicly addressed Ruiz’s arrest or the suspensions, per the discipline policies of Penguins second-year head coach Bo Pelini and the university.
By now you’ve read and heard enough “no comments” to last a lifetime.
This isn’t about that. It’s about the danger of underestimating a team that has approached the entire season with a “next man up” mentality.
Whether it’s because of injuries, ineffectiveness or unmentioned disciplinary actions, the Penguins have been situations in which they were not at full strength.
“It’s business as usual for us,” Pelini said Tuesday.
Sure, the timing couldn’t have been worse for the news that several players allegedly flunked those random drug tests. It was the worst news at the worst possible time — with YSU football storming back into the national spotlight not because Bo yelled at someone but because the Penguins put themselves in that position by winning one big game, then another and another.
This week was supposed to be about YSU’s triumphant return to relevance in the FCS. Instead, all that the Penguins have accomplished on Pelini’s watch seems to have been overshadowed. Outside the program, the focus has been on the players who won’t be there.
But guess what? YSU will have some players there and a football game will be played Saturday night at Roos Stadium in Cheney, Wash.
I watched the 1997 Penguins, who finished the regular season 8-3 and third in the old Gateway Football Conference, go on a remarkable championship run. One of the stops during that December to remember was in Cheney, Wash., where YSU — again an underdog — beat Eastern Washington, 25-14.
It won’t be easy. The Eagles are a prolific passing team and it appears the Penguins will be without two starters in their secondary. But the game-time temperature could be below zero and the wind-chill factor will most certainly be well below that mark.
Maybe the conditions will serves as the equalizer this underdog YSU team needs.
Or maybe the Penguins will just refuse to lose again, much like that 1997 team.
People have been expecting YSU to fold at different times all season and it hasn’t happened yet.
Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.