The Performance Of The Year 2016 (and Was It My Fault?)

The results of the Performance of the Year Finals went like all of us suspected.  But what a year it was, after all!

Joe Kovacs became the first ever two time winner of the Performance of the Year, as the Olympics dominated the voting.  Joe also won last year for his Shot Put World Championship.  A silver medal in the Olympics is certainly worthy of at least 86% of voters attention.  And two PSU teammates (Joe Kovacs and  Darrell Hill) making the same Olympic team in the same event is worth way more than 42% of voters in my book.

It is also very rare to have an athlete named as Athlete of the Year at the Penn Relays Carnival (Brannon Kidder).  But this year it garnered only 33% of voter's minds!  And there may be only one Penn State Track Alumnus who has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail with his daughter (Blog Muse Rob and Phoebe Whiteside) but that only nabbed 19% of voters.

And I did make it to the Land of the Rat after repairs to the brake lines in one of the two Dopey Challenge team vehicles.  I got here just in time to take a 3 mile run and then watch the beginning of the Rose Bowl before everyone was ready to go to Disney Springs for dinner.  In other words, I watched the first few minutes of the game and saw the Nittany Lions go down 13-0.

Thankfully, the ship was righted as soon as I left and paid no attention to the game while walking to a very, very crowded Disney Springs.  I wistfully remember the days just a few years ago when the then named Downtown Disney was always practically barren.  PSU 49 - USC 22 while I abstained from the game as promised.

But I didn't know that today's games take nearly 5 hours and I made it back to the room in time for the start of the 4th quarter.  Needless to say, USC 17 - PSU 0.  I'm not making that up.  I missed every single Penn State point, but saw complete and total dominance by USC sandwiched around an otherwise a barn burner.

Disney in the AM