When Penn State men’s basketball takes the court on Sunday evening to face Ohio State it will mark the first of many things for the Nittany Lions this year.
The first Big Ten game of the season.
The first of two meetings with the Buckeyes this year.
And the first of two meetings against former Nittany Lion guard Jamari Wheeler.
It’s a self-explanatory storyline for a program that has lived out its fair share of drama over the past few years, managing to play under three head coaches in three years time. For his part, Wheeler was among the handful of Nittany Lions who transferred out of State College following the firing of now former head coach Patrick Chambers and then the eventual decision not to retain popular interim head coach Jim Ferry. Chambers is now an assistant to the head coach at LaSalle while Ferry is the head coach at UMBC.
Wheeler’s return to the Bryce Jordan Center, now wearing Ohio State’s uniform is the sort of thing that might be considered sacrilegious just down the street — in fact Wheeler yelled out “Beat Penn State” on the Ohio Stadium scoreboard as the Nittany Lion football team took on the Buckeyes in Columbus earlier this year — but on Sunday it is mostly a reunion of friends.
“I’m just excited to play Jamari,” big man and former roommate John Harrar said earlier this week. Harrar would later joke about body slamming Wheeler at some point on Sunday – the two are close friends, an unlikely paring of backgrounds and personalities and perhaps a threat unlikely to transpire.
With Wheeler on the opposing bench, the game itself will be the latest iteration of “what if?” for this particular gun-for-hire Penn State team. The Nittany Lions are still finding themselves under new coach Micah Shrewsberry and a fleet of transfers have given him plenty of warm bodies to work. That said what Penn State could have had was well established coming off a solid NCAA Tournament bound 2019-20 season and a somewhat promising 2020 campaign, chalked full of close losses.
There would have been Myreon Jones, there could have been Trent Buttrick (who – now at UMass – unloaded 19 points against the Nittany Lions in a win over Penn State earlier in the year) there would have been Izaiah Brockington, and of course there could have been Wheeler in that group too.
It might be bittersweet for Harrar when the season is all said and done to see how some of his former teammates are doing. Jones has been solid at Florida, Wheeler is coming off an upset of No. 1 Duke earlier in the week and Brockington is the leading scorer on an undefeated Iowa State team. Buttrick might have the least remarkable year of the bunch, but he’s playing, which is more than he could have said for most of his career at Penn State.
And of course there is Rasir Bolton, starting for No. 3 ranked Gonzaga and happily at his third team of his college career – a long way from the Bryce Jordan Center.
Per game averages of transfers.
Myreon Jones: 10.9 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2 assists
Izaiah Brockington: 16.6 points, 7.6 rebounds, 1.3 assists
Jamari Wheeler: 5.3 points, 2.9 rebounds, 3.6 assists
Trent Buttrick: 14.1 points, 4.3 rebounds, 1.9 assists
Time will tell how this current grouping of Nittany Lions will pan out. Shrewsberry’s roster isn’t short on experience or talent, even if consistency has been a question on the offensive end. In many ways it’s unfair to compare a team that is still finding itself to a team that doesn’t exist. The season is long, and the calendar has only just now turned to December.
All the same, as Wheeler takes the court it will be a remainder of what could have been, perhaps in a different multiverse.
But there’s no way home to that now.
“I’m just excited to go back and play where I was,” Wheeler said on Friday. “I’m just excited to go back.”
