A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Playoffs

To fully grasp why Penn State fans have placed so many of their emotional eggs into this season’s basket, it’s mandatory to take a step back and piece together the confluence of unexpected events that brought us to the cusp of this highly-anticipated crescendo.

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There’s an incredible amount of enthusiasm and confidence around Penn State football right now, and last week’s result (Drew Allar especially) did nothing to stifle it. If you’re following the team, you see and hear it everywhere: Fans genuinely believe this is the group that will contend for the playoff and maybe even win it all.

There’s an underlying sentiment implied in these statements: “They damn well better.”

I said it myself in my inaugural column here last week – “Anything less than 11-1 will be a disappointment.” – and this offseason, I’ve often found myself hearing and using phrases like “no more excuses” or exhorting James and his staff to relieve themselves or free up the toilet for others to use. Sure, fans of most power programs harbor perpetually high expectations, and preseason optimism is generally unremarkable, but there’s an acutely restless undercurrent to it in Happy Valley right now.

Why is that we’re all feeling so antsy? James Franklin, and especially Sandy Barbour, will hold up the historic run of four 11-win seasons in the last seven (conveniently omitting that the regular season used to be only 10 or 11 games), and State’s Rose Bowl victory means James is already halfway to running the New Years Six gamut only a decade into his tenure. On the whole, things seem pretty good. So what gives?

Well, friends, I think to answer that question fully and properly, we need to wind the clock all the way back to the turn of the century and retrace the winding path that brought us to the present. As the Nittany Lions look to tune up the machine against the Blue Hens, let’s journey back in time and unpack how the pressure they’re facing this season was forged…

Retirement questions weren’t anything new for Joe Paterno. His famous predictions of coaching “about four or five more years” dated back to the Reagan Administration. But in 2000, with his program coming off the major letdown of finishing 10-3 after beginning the ’99 season with title aspirations, the question of when State’s venerable coach would finally hang ‘em up took on more urgency. The team stumbled to only the second losing season of Joe’s career (only the third for Penn State since 1938!), finishing 5-7. What started out as grumbling at the fringes gradually grew in volume over the next several years, as the Nittany Lions remarkably recorded a total of four losing seasons in five years. Only one coach in America could have survived the miserable seven-win stretch of 2003-04. Joe burned through the reserve of political capital he’d accumulated over decades of winning football games and supporting the University, but even that unprecedented well of goodwill had nearly run dry. Very obviously, he’d hung on too long, and the game had passed him by.

What happened next feels more like a fairy tale than real life (someone really ought to write a book about it): In successfully wooing Justin King and Derrick Williams, respectively the top recruits in Pennsylvania and the nation, Joe added speed and playmaking ability to a roster that already featured a mega-talented defense and a wealth of generational leadership among its seniors. Penn State went on to capture two of the next four Big Ten titles and won 11 games in three of the next five years. Paterno had salvaged his job and legacy from certain doom, but spent portions of two of those seasons in the booth after sustaining injuries caused by player collisions. The old man wasn’t getting any younger.

Even with the turnaround, opinions diverged sharply on Joe’s decision to keep at it well past his 80^th birthday. On one hand, you can make the very reasonable case that it was borderline insanity for a program with Penn State’s history and resources, a football behemoth with the nation’s largest alumni base and one of its largest stadiums, to continue entrusting its future to an octogenarian who’d swapped the in-home recruiting visits on which he’d built his reputation for FaceTime calls from his iMac. One of my favorite anecdotes of that era is that Galen Hall, our 60-something offensive coordinator (for run plays), had been recruited to play for Penn State in the 1950s by our head coach. For fans enviously scanning the national landscape and dreaming of seasons like those experienced by USC, Texas, Alabama, and LSU, especially younger folks who had no memory of the real glory days, the end of the Paterno era couldn’t come fast enough.

Again, they had sound reasoning. Whether Bill O’Brien and James Franklin maybe exaggerated some of their stories about “watching game tape on VHS,” the metaphor is undoubtedly sound. The sport was already rapidly evolving toward its current incarnation – one where money, facilities, and recruiting (which all go hand-in-hand) would only widen the gap between the haves and have nots – and Penn State was really fudging it by successfully trading off Joe’s reputation and his staff’s willingness to accept comically-low salaries in exchange for job security. While Paterno had defied the odds in reversing the seemingly inescapable decline of the Dark Years of 2000-04, once the new guy came in, he’d have to maintain the momentum without whatever special sauce helped Paterno become the all-time winningest coach.

For my part, I took the opposite view. College football, for me, has always been about more than winning and losing games. The connections you feel to team, school, and place, and the de facto family that forms around them, meant more to me than the games themselves. It’s not to say that winning doesn’t matter (Joe’s Grand Experiment was about excellence on and off the field), only that a lot more goes into how I judge the state of the program. Of course Joe wouldn’t be around forever. I knew we were nearing the end, and whenever that day came, something that was unique in all the annals of college football, something of which each of us lucky enough to call ourselves Penn Staters owned a small piece – one man spending his entire career at one school, taking its football to the top of the mountain and elevating the whole institution in the process, staying longer and winning more than anyone had done before – would be gone from the universe, never to be experienced by anybody anywhere ever again. If getting to spend one or two more seasons experiencing that before it went away forever meant I got to see the Nittany Lions win eight or nine games instead of 10 or 11, I was ok with it.

But listen, no judgement here either way. I don’t think my way of consuming the college football product is superior to anyone else’s. Frankly, I’d guess I’m in the minority of Penn State fans in saying I wouldn’t trade two extra wins per season for cutting more corners or being lesser stewards of the young men we bring to campus on scholarship.

I love Joe, honor his memory, and deeply appreciate all he did for Alma Mater. I still slow down and feel a twinge of sadness every time I walk or drive by the tree where his statue once stood, and I still proudly display the ‘409’ magnets on my vehicles. I’m also not threatened by those who disagree and see the world differently. The Big (Tailgate) Tent of Nittany Nation is spacious enough to accommodate disagreement among Penn Staters of good faith.

Now there were a handful of fans in a third camp who insisted Joe hadn’t lost even half a step and was just as sharp and spry as ever. Those lovely folks (no judgement!) were lying, either to others or, more likely, themselves. That is to say that nearly all Penn State fans and alumni, irrespective of their views on JoePa, realized that a younger coach possessing more energy, ambition, and fresh ideas, could probably do more with the ample raw material that Joe had so steadfastly stockpiled over half a century. So whether, like me, you were happy to bask in the twilight of Joe’s career and cherishing his final days, or you were anxiously counting them down, in the backs of our minds, we were deferring gratification. For all of us, it was only a matter of time before his successor came in and cranked things up to 11.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Not at all.

Instead, the decade-plus of assuring ourselves that the next coach would unleash the might of a fully operational Penn State Football Death Star became an instant afterthought in the wake of the Sandusky Scandal. The details need not be revisited for the purposes of this story, but the upshot was that Penn State football found itself fighting for survival under the leadership of former Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien, who saw the program battered with withering NCAA sanctions less than seven months into his tenure. Long story short: the right man for the job.

Fans celebrated the improbable wins for the way they defied the national narrative and united a fractured community, and they excused the inevitable losses as the byproduct of a depleted roster. For a while, records and rankings and bowl games didn’t matter all that much (convenient, since we were banned from the postseason). And yet the early days of Bill O’Brien’s brief, but memorable tenure still offered signs that the “sleeping giant” narrative had some legs. Bill’s offensive innovations and upgrades to strength and conditioning hinted at the program’s potential under a new coach who had to sing for his supper and couldn’t fall back on a McDuck money bin’s worth of banked goodwill in hard times. As grateful as we all were to have endured the program’s brush with death and appreciative of Bill’s steady leadership in trying times, we were only too happy to defer gratification yet again. Enough had gone right through an unbelievably trying ordeal that we could believe in the greener pastures waiting over the horizon. Despite the hard detour, it was only a matter of time.

Truth be told, we probably got a little spoiled during the early stretch of the sanctions. The legendary loyalty of the 2012 Lettermen and equally important commitment of 2013 recruits like Christian Hackenberg, Adam Brenneman, and Garrett Sickels helped mask the longtail effects of a 65-scholarship limit on an FBS roster. I’m sure Bill O’Brien was genuine in leaving to chase his NFL dream when Houston came calling with an offer he couldn’t refuse, but I’ve always assumed he understood that the impending shortage of offensive linemen meant the worst was yet to come. By his own admission, James Franklin himself underestimated the scope of the challenge presented by the NCAA’s sanctions and the lingering schisms within the Penn State community when taking over for Bill. So we can be forgiven for assuming this hotshot young superstar who’d done the impossible by winning at FRIGGIN’ VANDERBILT could slide right in and finally punch our long-delayed ticket to the Promised Land.

I think it’s easy to forget that James Franklin is only 51 years old, despite having already coached for a decade at Penn State. While his rapid ascent to the position of head coach speaks to his natural talents, it also means he still had plenty of room to grow in the role when Penn State hired him in 2014 (Nick Saban was two years from taking the Michigan State job at age 41). I applaud his loyalty to the staff who helped make him a success at Vandy, even if ascending to the sport’s pinnacle would ultimately demand a higher caliber of coach. I also acknowledge that the University, having shifted from the relative frugality of Athletics spending in the Paterno/Spanier era to the carpe diem survival mode of the sanctions, lacked any real understanding of what it truly meant to compete on a level playing field with the top programs in America. All of this is to say that both coach and institution had some growing, changing, and learning to do as they emerged together from the scandal-era swamp. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t always go smoothly.

If you’ve followed along here, you know many fans and boosters were by this point harboring almost 15 years’ worth of pent-up expectations for when Penn State would at last be “normal” again – no legacy coach hampered by the ravages of time, no media circus and punitive sanctions. Folks were getting restless, and losing to doofus coaches like Randy Edsall, Tim Beckman, and Brady Hoke didn’t help matters. After the ordeals of the previous few years, their impatience can probably be forgiven, but entering 2016, Franklin’s third season on the sideline, his grace period was all but spent.

James (to a fault, in my opinion) fixates on the students chanting “Fire Franklin” at halftime of the ‘16 Minnesota game, which saw 2-2 Penn State (already victimized by hated Pitt and embarrassed by Michigan) struggling against a pedestrian foe at home. It’s unlikely his job was actually in any danger, but the infamous chant does capture the zeitgeist of the moment. Fandom is emotional, and the vibes at that time were trending down. Fortunately for all involved, the pivot point was a mere two quarters away. After the late-game heroics of Chris Godwin and Trace McSorley set up a game-tying field goal, Saquon Barkley made short work of the Gophers in OT. You know what happened next; the Nittany Lions rode the momentum of that win through to an iconic home upset of #2 Ohio State at an unforgettable White Out and all the way to the Big Ten Championship. The switch had been flipped. It was happening.

Finally, our wait was over: At last, the long-deferred actualization of the program’s full potential was at hand. Except it wasn’t. Not quite.

All football coaches have healthy egos. Impossible to do the job without one. James Franklin shared the fans’ widely held belief that his arrival in Happy Valley all but cemented the shift from “if” to “when” Penn State would ascend to legitimate championship-contender status. When the moment arrived that the prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled, there was no bigger believer than the man himself, and he and his staff hit the recruiting trail with a swagger, ready to lay the foundation of a dynasty. Franklin captured the conference crown with what Bill O’Brien might describe as a bunch of (ahem) fighters: Overlooked and underappreciated three-star scrappers like McSorley, Jason Cabinda, Grant Haley, and Marcus Allen. But to challenge the programs that reigned atop college football’s Olympus, State would need to start attracting the rarest breeds of elite athlete. Naturally, everyone from coaches to message board lurkers believed the 2016 Big Ten title signaled that we were ready to navigate those choppy recruiting waters. We weren’t.

Brazenly engaging in head-to-head battles with the likes of ‘Bama, Clemson, and Ohio State for the best of the best of the best, Penn State repeatedly came close, but came up short. Franklin and Co. missed on the sort of game-ready difference makers who decide championships, and instead, as I described it, “captured their stunt doubles” – kids who were talented enough to deserve Division I scholarships, just flawed enough that the true kings of the sport passed them over, and yet also lacking the humility and chip on their shoulders of having been underranked.

Meanwhile, on the field, while seasons were often damaged by irritating losses to less-talented opponents like Michigan State and Minnesota (something I hope James worked out of his system last season), ask most fans what galls them most about the last several years, and they’ll name the two one-point losses to Ohio State in 2017 and 2018. One or two plays different could have changed the outcome of those games and possibly altered the trajectory of the program in such a way that tipped those crucial recruiting battles Penn State’s way. As it was, the talent gap between the Buckeyes and Nittany Lions was probably the reason those games turned out as they did and underscores just how brutally hard it is to go “from ‘great’ to ‘elite’” in this sport.

That was the aftermath of the program’s remarkable reversal of fortune in 2016. After scrambling up the mountainside and sighting the peak, Penn State seemed trapped in a maddening state of “always the bridesmaid” limbo. Final rankings of 5, 9, 12, 10, and 11 during the 2016-present playoff drought hint at how close the Lions routinely came to snagging a spot in the Final Four. I started describing it as “the Agony of Almost.” As a side note, good news for Lions fans suffering through that agony is that the only fanbase in America with bluer balls than Penn State’s through most of the playoff era probably belonged to now two-time national champion Georgia. The Bulldogs are proof positive that such feelings of futility are inescapable right up until the moment that they aren’t.

A run of bad luck punctuated by the bizarre nature of our times would follow. An 11-2 team in 2019 saw its high hopes squashed by the Big Ten’s muddled off-again, on-again approach to playing through the pandemic, plus the loss of electrifying running back Journey Brown to a heart condition and superstar linebacker Micah Parsons to an opt-out. Breaking in multiple new position coaches via Zoom and erring far to the side of caution in managing COVID, the team struggled to the first 0-5 start in school history during what I term “the fake season.” The following year started with promise, but went completely off the rails once Sean Clifford and P.J. Mustipher were injured in a loss at Iowa.

Penn State’s “there and back again” journey to the cusp of contention has been, with respect to the great Paul McCartney (or at least to the lookalike contest winner who assumed his identity in 1966) a long and winding road. This year’s Nittany Lions aren’t just expected to discharge frustrations dating back to the COVID year or 2017’s near miss or even the scandal and sanction era; cumulatively, they’re bearing the weight of anticipation that’s been building, in some cases, since Bill Clinton occupied the White House.

To his eternal credit, through it all James Franklin continued working and building, learning and adapting. After struggling to leverage the success of 2016-17 into bigger things and navigating the pandemic to disastrous results on the field, all he did was assemble what is, by far, the best top-to-bottom coaching staff of his career and exceed even his own high standards on the recruiting trail. And so here we are, excited to be watching a team that is ready to win big.

“And they damn well better.”

Three for the Road:

1. When I think of the University of Delaware, I think of three quarterbacks and a linebacker: Rich Gannon, Joe Flacco, Pat Devlin, and Troy Reeder. Gannon and Flacco are noteworthy as Blue Hens QBs who ended up in the Super Bowl, but Devlin and Reeder were both once Nittany Lions for whom I harbored high hopes. Pat had to sit behind the great Daryll Clark in 2008, but can always point to his game-winning drive in Columbus. Troy, Freshman All-B1G as a Nittany Lion in 2015, proved an NFL-caliber talent whose impact was missed in 2017 and ‘18.

2. Speaking of the 2008 team, I still remember that team’s vaunted offense opening a conference championship season by hanging 66 on the poor Chanticleers of Coastal Carolina. Could we see the Lions approach this lofty point total on Saturday? It’s a number to shoot for. It seems almost cruel to root for the Franklin era’s high-water mark of 79 (from a 79-10 drubbing of Idaho in 2019) and downright vindictive to cheer for this squad to eclipse the legendary 81-0 beatdown of Cincinnati from 1991. Let’s afford the Hens a bit more credit than that, especially since this week our scrubs don’t have to worry about beating the spread.

3. Penn State will empty the benches this weekend, so expect many youngsters to start the clock on the four-game grace period for preserving their redshirts. A few guys I’m hoping to see get some run: QB Jaxon Smolik earned effusive praise from James Franklin this Summer; at the open practice, RB London Montgomery looked explosive and fully recovered from a knee injury suffered his senior year of high school; and I whiffed on LB Tony Rojas in this space last week (I did warn you about the kicking though), so let’s double down on LBU’s purported Next One for a game with considerably lower pressure attached.