Blue White Roundtable: Alabama Week Edition
September 7, 2011 – | 1 Comment

Once again, it’s Adam Collyer over at BlackShoeDiaries providing the questions, and we, your humble bloggers, providing the answers. Mine are below, and you can venture off to the remote areas of the blogosphere that …

Read the full story »

The Penn State All-Decade Team: Defensive Tackles

Submitted by on December 21, 2009No Comment

To celebrate the upcoming new year, and new decade, we’ll be offering a retrospective here at quebecpenspinning. Over the next two weeks, we’ll reveal all the members of quebecpenspinning’s All-Decade team, comprising of the best Penn Staters from 2000-2009. Don’t agree with our picks? Let your voice be heard in the comments! We continue today with a look back at Penn State’s best defensive tackles of the past decade.

Defensive tackle isn’t always the most glorious position to play. While defensive ends are tasked with getting after the quarterback, and linebackers have the duty to tackle the ball carrier, the defensive tackles make it all possible by clogging running lanes and eating up blockers. The best mark of a defensive tackle doing his job is the superior play of everyone around him, and our choices below went above and beyond just that. They pressured the quarterback, pushing back blockers and penetrating beyond the line of scrimmage. They swallowed up ball carriers, not even letting them get to the next level. Their superior play bolstered tremendous defensive performances, and as such, they make the quebecpenspinning All-Decade team.

Jimmy Kennedy (1999-2002) stood out in an era in which not too many Nittany Lions excelled. While stories of Kennedy’s girth are legendary–the commonly repeated story is that he came into Penn State weighing close to 400 pounds, his play on the field was perhaps just as epic. A four-year starter for Penn State, Kennedy made an immediate impact on a struggling program, being named an all-Big Ten honorable mention player in his sophomore season and an first-team all-conference player in his junior seasons, despite the abject failure of the rest of the team around him. With Penn State struggling, Kennedy weighed heavily a decision to enter the NFL a year early, but chose to return to Penn State for his senior year, a move that paid obvious dividends, as Kennedy experienced a metamorphosis, from a solid tackle to one of the best linemen in the country. As a senior, Kennedy racked up 87 tackles, 5.5 sacks, and even knocked down 3 passes at the line, en route to a spot on the All-America team. A finalist for all sorts of post-season awards, Kennedy found himself a first-round draft pick, 12th overall, and one of 4 Nittany Lions drafted in the first round of the 2003 NFL Draft, though he has failed to find the same success in the NFL that he did during his Penn State playing days.

http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c117812/media_center/images/rendered/blog/wysiwyg/Jared-Odrick.jpgJared Odrick (2006-2009) came to Penn State with considerable fanfare, a consensus All-American, and lived up to that promise almost immediately. Though he saw the field very little as a freshman, by his sophomore season Odrick was making a big impact on the Lions defense, playing both defensive end and tackle. Going into his junior season, Odrick was firmly entrenched as a starter at defensive tackle, and following the dismissals of Chris Baker and Phil Taylor before the season, and exacerbated by the mid-season legal issues of Abe Koroma, Odrick was thrust into an every-down role. Jared wouldn’t be on this list if he didn’t rise to the occasion, and, after a 4.5-sack, 10-TFL season, Odrick was named to the all-Big Ten first team. Odrick was even better in his senior season, coming through with 6 sacks and countless pressures despite constant double-teaming. Though the Big Ten media listed Odrick as merely a second-team player, the coaches not only voted him as the best defensive lineman, but as their conference player of the year, perhaps the ultimate form of respect. Odrick was also named to the CBS All-America team and the AFCA All-America team, as voted on by the coaches of the NCAA.

Honorable Mentions: Jay Alford, Anthony Adams

top related stories
you may also like