Penn State made a position switch on Saturday that might not have saved the game but might have salvaged the season.
Or maybe the season was already beyond salvaging, and the switch only solved one of many, many problems while possibly creating another.
It is increasingly difficult to draw any firm conclusions about this Penn State team, which lost in a different fashion for the fourth straight week, other than that it’s not very good. The Nittany Lions have been consistently sloppy, but also shown flashes. They’ve been more than competitive when it comes to total yards accrued vs. yards allowed (501-298 on Saturday), a metric that doesn’t mean anything without context but usually speaks to general competency, and yet they continue to be insanely bad in the red zone, where they now have eight touchdowns in 19 visits.
The insertion of Will Levis at quarterback for Sean Clifford provided more of those scoring chances, and 20 of the team’s 23 points, as well as a vastly needed spark that seemed to permeate not only the rest of the offense but the rest of the team; the defense allowed only eight first downs and six points after Levis took over early in the second quarter. There was the powerful running style the 220-pound bruiser had shown last season, yes, but there was also a confidence and decisiveness in the pocket we had not seen from his predecessor this fall.
