As a back-up quarterback, Shane McGregor has experienced a bowl game before.
Heck, he probably got as rigorous a schedule as he could’ve hoped in 2011. A freak accident after a post-practice scuffle last month briefly hospitalized Matt McGloin and knocked him out of the TicketCity bowl, combined with Paul Jones being academically ineligible, catapulted McGregor into the back-up role in Monday’s 30-14 loss to Houston.
But McGregor will make his second bowl appearance in as many weeks Monday, and it’ll be much bigger than a third-tier bowl in Dallas in front of a crowd of 45,000. He and another college of communications student will get to cover the Bowl Championship Series National Championship in New Orleans, writing preview, game and feature content centered around the LSU-Alabama football rematch, Penn State announced Wednesday.
Additionally, they’re asked to write stories that the mainstream media would not necessarily consider, giving their work a chance to stand out among some of the most respected scribes in the business.
‘Immediately I thought of my own experiences,’ McGregor told the Altoona Mirror last week in the days leading up to the TicketCity bowl. ‘Those are two great defenses, and there’s a team that plays them almost every day, and that’s the scout team. So I’ll probably talk to their scout team quarterbacks. Some of their scout team players would be a unique angle that not a lot of people would cover that I actually know something about, too.’
The students’ work will be included in official BCS outlets and publications and will be available at http://comm.psu.edu/sports and https://blogs.comm.psu.edu/bcs online.
Shane Hennigan, a senior telecommunications major from Dunmore, Pa., will join McGregor in New Orleans, along with Malcolm Moran, the Knight Chair of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. McGregor, a junior majoring in journalism and English, was one of five students honored earlier this year with a $5,000 scholarship from the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation as part of a national essay competition. McGregor’s winning essay was on his former coach, Joe Paterno.
This is third such partnership of its kind the Curley Center has sought. Five students covered the Pan Am Games in October and two students covered the men’s basketball Final Four last April.
‘They have earned this opportunity through outstanding work in class and professional opportunities,” Moran said in a press release. “After covering national championship games as far back as 30 years ago, it will be great fun for me to see this event through their eyes.”
