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Joyce is the captain and quarterback of Project Mayhem intramural flag football team. Project Mayhem is one of more than 300 hundred intramural flag football teams at Penn State.

Joyce is a competitive person who enjoys playing many physically demanding sports, but does not have the skill to play in Division I.

"I wasn't good enough to make it to the next level in college, so IM sports, is a great way to hold onto your athletic dream for a couple more years" Joyce said.  

Intramural teams are divided into three divisions: majors, minors and co-ed. Majors teams are comprised of fraternity students and minors are comprised of non-fraternity students and co-ed is teams comprised of girls and guys.

The name Project Mayhem is borrowed from the movie, The Punisher, which is about a comic book antihero who uses threats of violence as acceptable crime-fighting tactics. Joyce said he and his teammates love to watch the movie for inspiration.

"Our team goes out and destroys the opponents we play and leave them for dead," Joyce said.

An hour before every game, Project Mayhem players practice offensive plays and discuss strategies for defense. Joyce and his offensive players scrimmage against the defense. 

Joyce said he tells the defense what type of formation to use so the defense can figure out how to prevent touchdowns.

"We mostly are in a shotgun set and sometimes we use a three wide receiver set," said Joyce.

In the shotgun instead of the quarterback receiving the snap from center at the line of scrimmage, he stands at least 5 yards back. An advantage of the shotgun formation is that the quarterback has more time to set up in the pocket which gives him a second or two to locate open receivers.

A three wide receiver set is where three receivers line up on the same side of the field. The side is usually specified by the quarterback calling "Trips right" or "Trips left" when the quarterback calls the play in the huddle. The objective of the formation is to flood the defense on one side to create and exploit hole in zone pass coverage.

Some of the designs were inspired by the John Madden football video games.

Each time Project Mayhem plays, several other IM games are being played at the same time. Watching the games pumps Joyce's players up.

Joyce said he thinks about the upcoming game each week. He enjoys playing the game to get away from homework and studying for tests. He said he looks forward to every game he plays.

"Week in and week out it's probably the thing I would look forward to the most. It gets me through the week with tough classes and tests" Joyce said. 

In the Intramural system, a team's loss dashes their postseason hopes. The team with the best record against their division makes the playoffs. Joyce led his team to a 3-2 mark and needed to win a tie-breaker game to make the playoffs.

Project Mayhem's loss in the tie-breaker game shocked Joyce and his teammates, but he said there is always next year.

"I know everyone had fun, but we will be ready for next year and prepare to go all they way" says Joyce.

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