This Penn State football season has been what you make it. The glass is half full or it is half empty. There is not much in the middle. If you wanted to a see a program not far from getting over the hump the evidence is there to be found. If you wanted to see a program still falling short of its highest aspirations in the same sorts of ways it always has, that is there to be found as well.
Like so many things in life, what to see is in the eye of the beholder.
There is an undeniable truth running through all of it. Penn State has played three-straight games with bone-crushing dominance, including Saturday’s 55-10 thumping of Rutgers on Saturday. In fact it has played most of the season this way. There have been ugly moments, but the overarching theme has been that of a team simply running over lesser opponents. There have been flashes of vulnerability and weakness but the Nittany Lions are good, and they’ve proven it time and time again.
Over the past three games Penn State has outscored opponents 130-24, and in five straight they’ve scored at least 30 with an average of 41.2 points per game. For all the instances that have made people gnash their teeth at Sean Clifford or shake their fist at James Franklin, Penn State, with few exceptions, has done very little in the way of anything other than run other teams over.
Even before the Ohio State game — which saw Penn State put up its traditionally stiff test against the Buckeyes — the Nittany Lions steamrolled through most everyone but Michigan and only absolutely horrendous weather kept Northwestern from experiencing a similar fate. Purdue was a challenge, but opening on the road to start the season against a quality team is a moment in a vacuum. In short, Penn State has been pretty well blowing out almost everyone it has played and has on just one occasion — against the current No. 3-ranked team in the nation — looked out of sorts. Otherwise, the Nittany Lions have been taking names and kicking asses. And sure, maybe none of that matters to you if all you want are those big wins. Penn State is probably going to win next week, go to a bowl that isn’t the playoffs and quickly turn the page toward the Drew Allar era. It’s fair to look ahead, but it’s also fair to remember something else.
This could have gone differently.
“I feel like it shows major growth especially from the last two years that I’ve been here,” linebacker Curtis Jacobs said after Saturday’s game. “We allow those [losses] to hurt us [in the past] and I feel like this year we were able to really go in Sunday, talk about it and get it out. Get it out of our mind and get ready for the next week. So I feel like that’s been the most important part.”
It’s fair to maybe doubt that any kind of reasonable apocalyptic collapse would have befallen Penn State in order to really lose any of its last three games. Then again, as Maryland took Ohio State to the brink, Michigan nearly lost to Illinois and Indiana beat Michigan State in overtime on Saturday, it’s also a reminder that winning is hard, and that easy wins don’t come without work in all the days leading up to them.
Win? Sure. But end-to-end blowouts? That’s a horse of a different color.
“It’s part of the game of football and if you love the game, you want to come back and get better the next day,” tight end Tyler Warren said. “It speaks a lot to our coaching staff. I think they do a great job of just leading us and showing us what we need to do and we listen to them, we trust them and it works out. Winning is hard. So every victory you get is as a reason to celebrate. We’re gonna celebrate this one and it feels good to win games, and that’s what we’re here to do so every win we get we’re going to be happy and excited about.”
If Penn State were to make it to 11 wins, that would be something worth noting, no matter where the losses came from. In the last 30 seasons, Penn State has won 11 games just eight times. While schedules and formatting have helped that somewhat, Penn State would hit the 11-win mark for the fourth time in seven years. Whatever James Franklin’s shortcomings might be, you can’t win the big games if you don’t win the other ones, and winning 11 on a semi-regular basis is a much better problem to have than most others.
And yes, those wins matter too, the ones you might care just a bit less about. Then again, teams don’t win blowouts because they don’t care.
“We’re one of the greatest teams in this country,” safety Ji’Ayir Brown said. “And we’re finally starting to see the pieces and put the puzzle together. These guys finally got it, they bought in and they keep getting better. There’s no cap on where they can go.”
For Brown, he feels some of that glass-half-empty viewpoint that many fans might have as well. It was *this close* and then it was gone. Penn State might win 11 games but it will be hard for Brown to rinse the taste of *almost* from his mouth. Is there pride in not folding? Sure, but satisfaction? Perhaps not quite.
“It’s hard for me to find satisfaction in that because I knew this team was gonna be special,” Brown said. “I knew this team was going to be the team we are today. It was just a matter of time. I can’t find satisfaction but when they come back next year, they’re going to be ready.
“There’s definitely pride to be found in [not folding after losing big games]. The guys stuck with it. Those games that we did lose, we recognized our mistakes and we knew that wasn’t us, and it sucks, knowing that wasn’t [us] and knowing that you can’t get it back. That sucks but the guys didn’t hang their heads and they said, ‘the next games throughout the season, we’re gonna show that we were supposed to be there.’”
It sends Penn State toward a strange place in the college football landscape. The Nittany Lions might end up being an 11-win team nobody really cares about but also ought to respect more than they do. Penn State is out there playing hard, blowing the doors off of people and it matters to them. But beyond that? Hard to say. There’s maybe something a bit pure in all of it, the idea that once the biggest goals of your season are gone that going out and playing well and playing hard is still motivation enough. Maybe you want the big shiny trophy, but maybe you also just want to beat some teams into the ground and get a kick out of that as well.
That may not hang a trophy on the wall today, but it’s not a bad way to build toward it. In some respects, the sign of a healthy program isn’t how many or how often you win big games, but how the rest of the games go when everything is off the table.
“I put it on the backs of our leadership, the guys who have surrounded me along the process … They just bought in,” quarterback Sean Clifford said. “We said hell or high water we’re gonna see this thing through and we’re gonna make sure that we put Penn State in the best position possible and make them proud. So it’s about finishing the year strong and just one game at a time. I’m never going to take anything lightly here because I know I don’t have much left.”
