Penn State Football: Looming Michigan and Ohio State Games Latest Benchmarking Moments for Program

For fans of Penn State football, the Nittany Lions sit in a precarious situation perched between the joys of elite success and the doldrums of dreaming of “next year.” It’s a purgatory of sorts to be 5-0 in the Big Ten East with the most consequential games of the season still ahead, everyone equipped with the knowledge that present success might very well be met with future failures.

Of course, by all measures Penn State football has had a successful past decade. The Nittany Lions are 72-34 under James Franklin over the last nine years with 11 of those losses coming between a 2020 COVID-19 season and a season impacted by an injury to quarterback Sean Clifford in 2021.

More relevantly, since the start of the 2016 season Penn State has gone 58-22, with a Big Ten Title to show for its efforts and the broad peace of mind that the program is in good hands. It hasn’t always been pretty, but the Nittany Lions have taken care of business far more often than not. Remove games against fellow Big Ten East hitters in Ohio State and Michigan and Penn State has gone 54-16 since 2016. This takes some revisionist history and mental gymnastics to embrace — every team has a better record when you ignore some of the losses, but it hammers home a bigger point. No matter the occasional and inevitable bump in the road, Penn State’s obstacle to truly elite success are two programs and two programs alone: Michigan and Ohio State.

Which makes for an interesting challenge when it comes to Franklin’s public messaging as these contests once again round into view. Franklin is perpetually even-keel when talking about the importance of any given game, but there is a pragmatism in publicly embracing what the next few weeks mean. Everyone has been around too long to pretend that a game against Michigan is somehow the same as a game against Rutgers. They simply aren’t the same thing. Yes, you have to win the game against Rutgers for the game against Michigan to matter, but one is much harder to come by than the other.

“We know that these types of games each year are critical and we’re not the only program in this conference or in this country that is in this in this situation,” Franklin said on Tuesday. “[But if you] put all your eggs in these games then you can put yourself in a situation where you don’t handle the ones before that you need to that everybody wants to look past. So that’s kind of the fine line of managing those two things, do everything you possibly can to get yourself to this position. And then also be as strategic as you possibly can to take advantage of these opportunities when they come.”

To his credit Franklin isn’t wrong. Penn State has spent the better part of the last decade getting to the big game on a regular basis and you don’t do that without winning the other ones along the way. Overlook the less sexy matchups and you end up losing them too. If anything the irony for Franklin is that his relative success at Penn State has set the program up for more dates with potential failure on the national stage. Getting to the big game doesn’t mean you’ll win it, but better to lose big games than to never play in them. That’s the theory Franklin is banking on – Penn State may only beat both Michigan and Ohio State once every few years, but it’s better to be in those big games once a year than three times a decade. You might lose more, but that beats never getting a regular chance to have those games truly matter. The more swings you get the better.

All the same, there’s almost certainly some degree of broad stress and potential frustration that comes from weeks like this one as a result of ‘almost’ success. Penn State winning games against Northwestern in the rain doesn’t mean much to anyone because the status quo long has been such a result. But when it comes to a three week stretch featuring games against Michigan and Ohio State, that’s when you have a chance to change the other status quo, the one which assumes Penn State is good, but not that good.

You wait a whole year for eight quarters of football. A reminder in many ways that being a head coach is much more like running a business that happens to play football 13 or so days out of the year. Lots of things lead up to a game like Saturday’s, and most of them happen when football isn’t even being played. And then if you’re lucky and you’re good, you win. But more often than not you wait a very long time just to lose again.

“It’s one of these things where not only is this Saturday critical in terms of how we manage the game and how our players go out there with the confidence and swagger to make the plays when they’re needed. But it’s also the things we’ve talked about in the past. It’s all of the progress that you can make the other 364 days a year that add up,” Franklin added. “All those all those little wins add up all year long to put your team in the best position to be successful consistently on Saturdays. And that’s where I’m pretty excited which I think you guys know you know [New athletic director Patrick Kraft] has been great with those types of things. He’s been really good at recognizing those things without me even having to say anything about it. And that’s been great. I would say even all the way up to the [university] president and the chair of the board as well. I think that alignment that you’ve heard about is critical.”

Saturday will be the latest in a growing list of benchmark moments for Franklin while at Penn State. Time will tell what the results are, but in the first go around with Kraft at his side Franklin will give the Wolverines and Buckeyes his latest best-effort and turn to his boss and say “this is where we are.” Whether or not improved housing and fancier student-athlete bells and whistles will prove to be the difference is a different debate for a different time, but it’s almost certainly part of the equation.

Nevertheless no matter how you slice it Penn State’s meeting with Michigan is the kind of game that win over detractors or create more of them. Franklin may not have to worry about the opinions of message board posters in this day and age, but even for a coach who spends much of this time trying to tell everyone that every game is exactly just as important as the last, even he can’t pretend that the next three weeks don’t come with bigger stakes.

“At the end of the day we’ve got to do everything we possibly can to put ourselves in a position to get to this point where we are 5-0 with a top 10 matchup on the road in a tough venue,” Franklin said. :And we’ve got to have an unbelievable week of preparation. We’ve got to make sure that our our players are approaching it the right way and I’ve got to make sure that the staff is approaching it in the right way to put ourselves in the best position to be successful on Saturday and it’s gonna be a challenge.”