During the darkest time in Penn State history, with every move we make scrutinized by the national media, you’d think Penn State fans would show a little class when a player underperforms on the field.

Wrong.

If you watched the Penn State-Virginia game, you know that sophomore kicker Sam Ficken missed four field goals and had an extra point blocked. The blocked PAT ended up the deciding factor in a game the Lions lost 17-16.

I understand that a kicker’s only job is to put the ball through the uprights and Ficken failed to do that on four out of five field goal attempts. I didn’t realize until today that Penn State is full of top rate kickers and place kicking gurus — and they all have Twitter! Evidently, we are so loaded with kickers that we might as well start calling ourselves Kicker U.

Kicking specialist @DaveZita, who is probably enjoying a long NFL career because by the looks of his avatar he’s at least 30, tweeted at him saying:

“Clean your lokcer out, kid. You had multiple attempts to step up and you proved weak. Let someone else wear the jersey. Please”

Are you asking for his jersey, Zita? Do you still have a couple of years eligibility left because we’d love to have you.

Or @PSUBoomboxGuy who posted,

“I kick the bloody piss outta broken boomboxes further and more accurate than that.”

So when are you going to try out? I would love to see what you could do kicking a football instead of a boombox.

And I’m sure @alphamanges who tweeted “Good fuckin ficken job u piece of fucking fickin shit,” could have done so much better.

I understand the frustration from this weekend. I wasn’t happy with his performance either. But tweeting,”If your name is Sam Ficken and you can’t make a field goal to save your life just kill yourself,” like @jcaposela did, isn’t going to change anything.

It’s easy to criticize someone until you’re in that position. I guarantee that half of the people that threatened or harassed Ficken can’t even kick an extra point.

Keep in mind, Ficken was one of the 114 players who decided to stay with Penn State when he easily could have transferred. The projected starter and All-Big Ten kicker, Anthony Fera, transferred to Texas after the NCAA sanctions. Ficken was thrown into this role at the last minute.

With all that has happened here, everybody wants to talk about what is and isn’t Penn State. Attacking a player on twitter is not Penn State, and trust me the tweets out there are much worse (some of which you can read here).

If you attack a 19-year old college football kicker, you are not Penn State, so please shut the fuck up.