Love was in the air for the Nittany Lions in their home opener against Ohio, in the form of a feathery 32-yard touchdown pass from rookie quarterback Drew Allar to rookie receiver Omari Evans, and it was on the ground, in the form of 179 yards and two big-play tuddies from freshman Nick Singleton. A dozen true freshmen saw the field for the home team in a mostly clean, well-rounded 46-10 pounding of an overmatched MAC squad, but Allar and Singleton were the darlings of the crowd, and they underscored what has been an inescapable theme of the season:

Now that Penn State has found love, what are they gonna do with it?

This was the game plan James Franklin had talked about executing all week, and it didn’t involve scheme or audibles. Rather, Franklin had emphasized the importance of developing depth, of getting some of these young and exciting players live reps when it counted, especially during one of the few weeks on the schedule that wasn’t supposed to be a four-quarter rock fight.

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• Throughout the offseason, we paid tribute to the infamous, ludicrous, incredibly loose-jowled Beano Cook/Ron Powlus 2 Heisman prediction from 1993 by applying the same lofty expectations any time we mentioned 5-star PSU true freshman Drew Allar in a video, blog post, tweet, Facebook comment, etc…you know, to be funny. Turns out – according to the tents pitched on Penn State twitter around 2:30 pm EST today — we set the bar WAAAAAY too low with our Beano homage.

• In all seriousness, the quantum leap Allar has taken in 5 months – from shaky, raw, multiple-red-flags rookie in the Blue-White Game to the surprisingly poised, surprisingly in-command , surprisingly advanced thrower we’ve seen in limited snaps vs. Purdue and now Ohio – is a credit to not only the work Allar put in during the summer months, but a credit to Mike Yurcich’s ability to mold talented lumps of clay.

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