There’s a lot to be said for how Penn State looked, and how it didn’t look during its soggy and largely unremarkable 23-7 victory over Rutgers on Saturday.
The Nittany Lions appeared to be a team more confident coming off a win over Michigan. They looked like a team sure of what it needed to do – and more importantly- sure of what it needed to avoid doing.
They looked physical in the trenches, powerful on the ground and quarterback Sean Clifford did what was asked of him, managing the game rather than gambling it away with high-risk chances.
It wasn’t flashy, an opening drive that lasted 17 plays and took 6:31 off the clock but came away with no points was evidence enough of this. The Nittany Lions in this particular form are operating from the standpoint that safe and fundamental football can -and will- win you a lot of games.
That is almost always true, especially when you’re not playing good ones.
In turn, quarterback draws may not be exciting, they may rarely push the chains 40 yards down the field all at once, but they’re easy and they’re hard to screw up. They also tend to work more often than not. And when you’re 1-5, making the list of things you did right longer than the list of things you did wrong goes a long way.
So Penn State made that list as long as it could. It ran the ball 57 times, rarely threw farther than just beyond the line of scrimmage and found ways to rinse-and-repeat that method of attack over and over again.
On defense against an allegedly competent Rutgers’ offense the Nittany Lions won the battle up front, getting the Scarlet Knights off schedule, requiring Rutgers to try and execute the kinds of plays it really didn’t want to, because it really didn’t have the ability to.
When it was all said and done, Penn State looked better than Rutgers and that manifested itself on the scoreboard. The only way the Nittany Lions were going to lose was if they got in their own way, and for once, it didn’t.
What Penn State didn’t look like is cause for both concern and optimism. The Nittany Lions didn’t look the team that was discombobulated against Maryland, nor the one haplessly flailing at Iowa.
It also didn’t look like a team doing much more than the bare minimum that beating Rutgers required. This was not an explosive game, this was not Penn State coming out of a cocoon and turning into a reimagined version of 2016 or 2017, or even 2019 for that matter. It looked like a Penn State team that has watched enough film of its own mistakes to avoid them, it still finds itself battling its own shortcomings, it’s just battling them better.
This is the challenge Penn State faces moving forward with James Franklin and his staff. What Penn State does or doesn’t look like right now at the start of December is largely inconsequential relative to the future of the program. The Nittany Lions face an offseason where they will lose players for various reasons, they will maybe face a second summer without in-person practices, without spring ball and without all the normal dressings of a regular offseason.
Things are not suddenly going to become normal.
Clifford mentioned in passing during his postgame interview that he likes to remind himself that this team is the same one that went 11-2 and won the Cotton Bowl. He means it as a point of confidence building, or as a reminder that plenty of players on this particular team know how to win. There’s nothing entirely wrong about his point, or the general confidence boost that comes with that self-talk reminder.
“You can do this, you’ve done it before.”
To a certain extent one might argue Clifford’s argument is some small part of a bigger list of reasons of how 2-5 came to be. The idea that what you’ve done could in some way make future success more guaranteed.
And while this may prove accurate in some areas, it can also lead to a false sense of security.
A dangerous thing in sports.
In turn how Penn State got to this point, and what it looks like as it navigates it is far less important than how it plans to get out of it. Wins over Michigan and Rutgers are a good first step and wins over Michigan State and a too-be-determined Big Ten West team would go even farther.
Generally it seems unlikely the Nittany Lions are going to flip a switch in the next two weeks. They will get better, they might even start to put together complete games, but even that will only get them back to the point of being better than most everyone else but still not better than Ohio State.
Which is to say it matters how Penn State looks now, but it will matter a lot more how it looks a year from now. In a lot of ways the Nittany Lions’ season of self-improvement begins when the football season ends. So two quarterbacks, three quarterbacks, five running backs or just one, all of that will sort itself out.
But on Saturday, Penn State looked like a team doing just enough to win and doing just enough to avoid getting in its own way in the process. That might get them a few more wins, but it won’t get them to where they really want to go.
In fairness, you can’t get to Step 2 without Step 1.
