Penn State was probably never going to live up to the cautious optimism that this team was the one to get the Nittany Lions into the playoffs, and once the season got going it was clear that might not be the case. Penn State’s 2016 campaign was a great illustration of it’s not how you start it’s how you finish, but this bunch never turned the corner in 2023 when it mattered most. Coming up short happens, but it usually looks better than this. Don’t expect a good grade, someone did get fired over this after all.
The Grade: D+
The Good: You can say whatever you want about how Penn State played in the two/three biggest games of the year but through the lens of “Does Penn State’s offense remind you of Iowa’s?” the Nittany Lions were a respectable team in that relative frame. “Doesn’t look like the worst offense in football” isn’t a high bar to pass, but frustrations surrounding the Nittany Lions’ offense can’t negate a few objective facts: Penn State finished 12th in scoring offense, 12th in time of possession, 29th in rushing offense and won 10 games this season. Compared to all sorts of teams those are admirable marks. Not being able to beat Michigan, Ohio State and Ole Miss is a big picture problem, but inherently a different kind of one than “can’t beat anyone at all.” It’s hard to say too many nice things about a team that fired its offensive coordinator and never established a reliable receiver, but saying this offense was unequivocally awful is ignoring a lot of objectively good things. Penn State did score 30+ in nine games. Then there were those other three.
The Not So Good: Broadly speaking there is nothing inherently wrong with not being as good as Ohio State or Michigan, but what Penn State failed to do in the season’s biggest moments was present any feasible solution to its own shortcomings in spite of talent that – should – have been capable of doing far more than it did. Beyond those specific games, Penn State entered the season with a pretty good idea of what it was and wasn’t good at, and in spite of this, proceeded to fail at improving in those areas. It’s not worth trying to theorize an alternative plan to what Penn State did against Ohio State and Michigan, but given two cracks at solving the puzzle Mike Yurcich failed to do so on a pretty monumental scale. That was really what his job boiled down to.
As an aside there is a narrative out there that James Franklin meddles in Penn State’s offense and that this is somehow to blame for Penn State’s issues, but there’s really no actual evidence to suggest this is the case beyond a lot of finger pointing. Whatever Franklin’s shortcomings are in this department, they tend to boil down more to “he’s in charge of everything” than tangible instances of in-game interference. Boiled down – Penn State didn’t get better, didn’t have answers to its own issues and lacked a creativity (for whatever reason) that was needed to make the most of what it did have. We will probably never know all of what there is to know about Yurcich’s time at Penn State but in there might lie more answers as to why things went so sideways.
Overall: 10 games counts for something, so does coming up so incredibly short when it mattered most. It’s one thing to lose, it’s another to look like that.
See all of the Positional Grades HERE.
