Penn State Football: Losing Danny O'Brien Transfer Opportunity Hurts

Wisconsin scored the biggest recruiting victory of the offseason by announcing that Danny O'Brien had joined the Badger football program this afternoon. O'Brien, a junior quarterback, is available to join the Badgers immediate after transferring from Maryland; he had graduated after three years and will be enrolling in graduate school at Wisconsin.

That's clearly good news for Wisconsin, but for their Leaders Division brethren at Penn State, obviously, not so much. Wisconsin now has a quarterback who can make basically every throw, per Michael Felder, and right now, Penn State has at least two who can make basically none of them.

This news means Penn State is going into 2012 with its same familiar QB tandem of Matt McGloin and Rob Bolden, and this year, redshirt freshman Paul Jones is in the mix. That's a competition that has just started, so if not even Bill O'Brien knows who the starting quarterback will be, we won't pretend to know either.

It's probably helpful, though, that a completely fresh set of eyes is seeing this quarterback competition. Recall, after all, that while Joe Paterno was coaching Penn State, Rob Bolden was seeing frequent playing time and often even starting while being probably the worst quarterback in D-I football. Yes, I'm including FCS.

Bolden's playing time came to an abrupt, merciful end when Tom Bradley took over the team in November (until McGloin got punched out before the TicketCity.com Bowl, anyway). Still, Bill O'Brien comes into this situation independent of any opinions that may have been made during the first two years of this wretched platoon. 

And now, barring an illogically large leap forward from one of the two incumbent quarterbacks or a breakout performance by Jones (in which case, why wasn't he playing last year?) (oh right, the grades), the platoon is still wretched.

All that said, this news probably won't submarine Penn State's entire season, and seven wins is still a reasonable floor for the year. The Nittany Lion defense is as fearsome as ever, especially since there aren't many quarterbacks in the conference that are capable of picking apart PSU's secondary, which will be unusually green this year.

It's just that one of the quarterbacks who can pick it apart is Danny O'Brien, and the fact that O'Brien will be doing that for Wisconsin instead of Penn State is a tough pill for Bill O'Brien to swallow.