You’re excused for not finding Penn State’s season to be the most aesthetically pleasing thing you’ve ever seen.
It’s a grind to watch, sometimes a few yards at a time with a predictability that makes everyone feel smarter about football than they really are.
For the most part the Nittany Lions are boiled down to the basics, good at a few things, very good at nothing of real consequence. They’re not trying to be the most explosive or the most flashy, they aren’t really trying to blow teams out. Instead it’s a delicate dance between doing enough to win without doing too many things that might eventually lead to mistakes.
On defense this group may not give off the intimidation factor of years past, but it’s effective when it has to be, and, for all of its shortcomings, has made the stops when called on over the past three games.
So at this point what you see is what you get. Penn State is 3-5 and has gotten here for a lot of reasons, most of which have been talked about at length. The horse is sufficiently beaten. Nevertheless…
It was injuries, it was a pandemic, it was racial tensions, it was opt outs, it was maybe not being as good as the other team. It was buy-in, it was talent, it was coaching, it was new coaches on staff, it was a new offense, it was a little bit of the bad luck that doesn’t always go your way because sports are really just about trying to control a bunch of arbitrary and often uncontrollable things.
But let’s get back to the three and the five and a few things about each number.
First there is the five. It happens, OK, it happens. Sometimes a team just isn’t that good or loses or has things spiral a little bit because that’s life. Sometimes you don’t prepare as well as you could have. Sometimes you contemplate in the dead of night how much you really even want to be playing in the first place.
At the end of the day there is no law of nature mandating Penn State football be good at all times until the end of time.
And there is the three.
There’s a lot that can be said about that number. The Nittany Lions waited forever for their season to start, then it was canceled, then it was back on. In the meanwhile family members got sick with COVID-19, or moved away for a few months to ride out the storm. Players saw their social life turn into a an experiment in becoming a hermit. Nothing was fun, nothing was what it was supposed to be. The entire team wasn’t even in the same locker room during the week, or during practices, or during meetings. The team wasn’t together.
Then imagine waiting nearly a year to play football only to find out your team isn’t as good as you hoped, and then losing the very first game in dramatic fashion, knowing that Ohio State and a second loss were most likely waiting just around the corner.
The kids are not having fun.
It got worse from there, 0-2 turned into 0-3 and pretty soon that turned into 0-5.
At this point Penn State could have packed it in. Truthfully, there are a lot of moments when the Nittany Lions could have looked at their list of goals and decided that being angry and indifferent was a lot more appealing. Things would have gotten worse, and worse, and worse.
And while Penn State may not be presenting fans with the most palatable or exciting brand of football, the Nittany Lions have found an equation that works just well enough to get the job done against teams equally as in crisis. A win over Michigan, a win over feisty Rutgers and now a win over Michigan State.
Sure, maybe you say to yourself that this season is a big bag of dumb, and you might not be wrong, but given a lot of choices Penn State opted to take the road less traveled. The door facing the word QUIT in big bold letters was right there staring them in the face, and the Nittany Lions didn’t take it.
Feel-good effort doesn’t win you national titles, but it does build a program back from bad seasons and forges chemistry that turns into even more winning. So there’s something to be said for the three.
“You know, with everything that’s going on in our country and everything that’s going on in our community and in college football,” coach James Franklin said after the game. “The way this team has stuck together, the way this coaching staff has stuck together, the way we’ve done it as a group..[I’m proud of it]”
Franklin said the word proud 17 times during his postgame press conference, one of the many you could use to describe the turnaround Penn State has made this year. Perhaps the 2020 season will be remembered as fondly as the year itself, but in the moment Franklin isn’t wrong about the pride he feels for having a team that didn’t quit when everyone had all the reason to.
Which brings us to the other number. Three plus five. Eight.
If we don’t consider Penn State’s to-be-determined crossover game against a west division opponent as a regular season contest, the Nittany Lions will have played every previously scheduled game. They will have never paused operations due to a COVID-19 outbreak and they will have never missed a significant number of players on a Saturday due to the virus. They will have played all eight games during a time when games are getting cancelled left and right.
Only two other Big Ten teams, Rutgers and Iowa, can say the same. Three more games than Ohio State, two more than Michigan. The list goes on and on.
And there’s something to be said for that too. One of Penn State’s core values is to ‘compete in everything you do’ and one would be hard pressed to say that the Nittany Lions haven’t managed to come out on top against the most important thing going on right now, far more important than whatever does or doesn’t happen on Saturday.
Maybe some of that is luck, but a lot of it is approach, diligence and discipline.
“The student trainers, the student managers that have been up here and and going through the COVID protocols and not seeing their families and I told our team take a moment and thank those people,” Franklin added. “I think about the developmental squad or the scout team guys. It’s hard to do that under normal circumstances. And then this year […] I’m proud of them.”
When it’s all said and done, Penn State is 3-5, and Franklin will be the first to say that isn’t good enough. It’s fair to still want more, fair to have wished things were going to be better. It’s fair to think it should have gone better and it’s fair to find moral victories to be slightly above Penn State’s institutional goals.
But that doesn’t change the more-than-silver-lining. Because you don’t get to three without fight, and you don’t get to eight without commitment.
And both of those things will help turn that five into something else come 2021.
