Linebacker Paul Posluszny’s eyes tell the story. It is one of frustration and anguish — the story of Penn State’s 2004 season in a nutshell.

Far from the most talented team in the Big Ten, the Nittany Lions scrapped, clawed and fought in every conference contest, only to come up short in six of them.

Head coach Joe Paterno’s club hung with then-undefeated Wisconsin despite playing the majority of the game with its third-string quarterback. They came up short in a late rally at Minnesota. Ditto against Purdue at home in State College. Posluszny and company held Drew Tate and a talented Iowa Hawkeyes team to six points, but still the Nittany Lions failed to pull out the win. The trend continued the next week at Ohio State and the next in a home matchup against Northwestern.

“We’d get frustrated all the time,” Posluszny said. “It was real bad. I can’t remember who we played — it might have been when we lost to Ohio State — and that was it. We knew we weren’t going to be able to go to a bowl, and you’re always going to have frustration like that.”

Posluszny and the rest of his defensive mates shined as a unit in 2004, never allowing more than 21 points in a game. However, the Nittany Lion offense endured struggle after struggle, with quarterbacks Zach Mills and Michael Robinson battling injuries and inconsistencies. As a result, Penn State failed to score more than seven points on five different occasions in 2004, leading to heartbreak after heartbreak against some of the Big Ten’s top squads. Regardless of how the numbers may bear out, Posluszny refuses to place all the blame on the shoulders of his teammates on the other side of the football.

“The way we look at it is, it’s not the offense’s fault, it’s the team’s fault,” Posluszny said. “We just have the attitude, you know, if we could have picked off a pass and returned it for a touchdown and scored, then that’s a game right there. So we didn’t really blame it all on the offense. It’s just losing in general is frustrating.”

However, a new-look offense and a confident and healthy Robinson has given the Nittany Lions reason for hope. No longer will the fifth-year senior, who has been used in a slash-type role on offense throughout his career, need to worry about where he will line up any given Saturday. With Zach Mills gone, Robinson is finally the unquestioned starting quarterback in Happy Valley.

“One time, I didn’t know whether I was going to play quarterback until I heard Joe on a radio station and he said it, and I was like, ‘OK, well, I guess I am starting at QB,'” Robinson said. “That’s hard, to be able to really focus and play like that. No excuses, a lot of things I messed up. I did that on my own.

But just the fact of getting more reps at quarterback, getting the timing down with receivers and things like that, knowing that when I speak in the locker room, it’s coming from the quarterback and not just the guy who plays a whole lot of positions who people wanted to be good.”

Penn State will employ more of a spread-formation look on offense to make better use of the multitalented Robinson, who will find more talent surrounding him following an impressive recruiting season by the coaching staff. Highly touted true freshmen Derrick Williams and Justin King should play a large role in the Nittany Lion passing attack despite their inexperience. Williams, the consensus top recruit in the nation, has already garnered his fair share of preseason publicity, and, along with King, enrolled a semester early to gain extra seasoning at the college level. King is listed as a cornerback, but will see time on both sides of the ball, giving Robinson another weapon at his disposal.

“I love it,” Robinson said of the new offense. “Spreading the field out — that creates mismatches on the outside. If they want to keep things bunched in, we’ll just throw it to some of our speedy receivers, and if they spread things out, then it’s hard to keep a spy on me.”

Now the Nittany Lions look to translate that newfound confidence on offense and the same grittiness on defense into wins.

“I feel really good about this football team because we hung in there together last year,” Paterno said. “There wasn’t a game that we were in that, with a couple of plays, we [couldn’t] have won. And I’m hoping we’re going to the next step.”