A Long-Expected Journey
The deep breath before the plunge: Pause for reflection and then crank some Steppenwolf: Nittany Nation is taking a magic carpet ride.
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I was fortunate enough to pen the first words published to this offbeat corner of the Penn State blogosphere following the Nittany Lions’ Rose Bowl victory (the last “real Rose Bowl” ever staged, in all likelihood) that capped the 2022 football season, so I’m digging the symmetry of being once again honored with this chance to author the final thoughts to appear here before this new season kicks off. In fact, I’ll be here every week; all throughout the season, I will be your humble blogger (Blogy-er?) for what we once called “Football Eve” ‘round Happy Valley parts.
This is going to be a column about the journey from late August to early January, one we all take together alongside our champions in Blue and White, and I hope it will be a chance to set the tone and frame a narrative heading into each Saturday. Other competent and capable folks, on this platform and several others, will equip you with the knowledge, analysis, and statistics to own your text thread or tailgate. They’ve got you covered in that department. For my part, I’ll seek to help you orient yourself as a small, but nevertheless crucial character in the much larger unfolding story of a season.
A memory sticks out for me from Penn State’s Big Ten Championship year of 2008: The undefeated Nittany Lions were hosting Michigan on Homecoming, mired in the throes of an unbearable losing streak to the Wolverines. This miserable slog had begun with future Heisman winner and national champion Charles Woodson’s visit to Beaver Stadium in 1997 and proceeded to extend through dispiriting blowouts and maddening close calls for the next decade. There I was in the stands that afternoon, married just a few months earlier, and I hadn’t seen Penn State defeat Michigan since the day I’d stepped foot on campus as a freshman. Infuriating.
I will never forget the nervous murmur that rippled through the unsettled capacity crowd when the drum major flubbed the opening flip. “Uh oh.” No matter how awful that year’s Rich Rodriguez-coached Wolverines had been, the scars ran deep from nine straight losses over 11 years (thankfully, Michigan had rotated off the schedule during the terrible early Aughts). Early on, our fears seemed justified. Those Wolverines – a dumpster fire of a team – looked more reminiscent of their predecessors who had tormented State for years, quickly putting up 14 points and stifling the potent Spread HD offense led by the likes of Daryll Clark, Derrick Williams, and Deon Butler. This couldn’t be happening, could it? Spoiler alert: It couldn’t. Michigan’s early success was a mirage, and Penn State turned a 17-14 halftime deficit into a 46-17 blowout win. Finally, mercifully, the dragon had been slain.
Following the game, I joyfully rejoined my tailgate crew, most of whom I’ll spend all day with this Saturday, and declared, “I thought for the first half, Penn State was playing against the ‘idea’ of the Michigan football team, and by the second half, they were playing the actual team on the field.”
My dear departed friend, the late Jason Waeltz ’04, a cynical, acerbic asshole whose nasally whine I still miss almost every day, scoffed at this interpretation. “They just got off to a slow start, and then recovered. That’s it. You journalists, you have to impose ‘narrative’ onto everything.” He wasn’t wrong, of course, but I also think he secretly enjoyed having a bard along for the ride.
Every good story deserves to be appreciated by those living through it, and the story of something as special as a Nittany Lions football season deserves to be told well, with some flair and historical context. In service of that, I will (I hope not obnoxiously) quote myself from that post-Rose Bowl article’s closing lines, written late on January 2nd:
Crank up the 2023 (i.e. Drew Allar) hype train: After failing to fully capitalize on the momentum of a 2016 conference championship and struggling to navigate the on-field challenges of the pandemic years, James Franklin has been focused on building toward another shot at cracking college football’s elite tier. From assembling maybe his best top-to-bottom crop of assistant coaches to returning to form on the recruiting trail, he has earned another bite of that apple, and hopes in Happy Valley over the next eight months are about to reach heights not seen here in half a decade. The momentum of this victory pours jet fuel on all of that – let’s start the party up and keep it going all the way through next year’s Rose Bowl. #WeAre
Pretty much.
Even the most casual observers will have noticed said Penn State hype train barreling along with all the momentum of a spectral locomotive that would rocket past the farm where your grandma grew up. Nittany Lions dot the Preseason All American lists. James Franklin is openly praising the roster depth and singling out camp standouts by name. Multiple prognosticators have made Penn State the trendy pick to make the playoffs and even to win it all. So those are the stakes. Anything less than 11-1 will be a disappointment. And here we sit, teetering on the very cusp of what just might be a year for the ages, and if it turns out as such, you’ll thank yourself for the rest of your days for taking the time right now – and all throughout the Autumn of 2023 – to savor the sounds, smells, images, and emotions that carry us through.
I liken a college football season to a storybook, with each week forming one new chapter. The narrative action builds throughout the days and hours leading up to kickoff, through developing headlines and mounting anticipation, and then climaxes with the game itself, the result then bridging into the chapters that follow.
A mass benching of upperclassmen sets the stage for an epic winning streak. Fans spend an offseason pining for Matt Knizner before John Shaffer runs the table. LaVar Arrington asks, “Who’s Dan Morgan?” before Chafie Fields breaks free in Miami. An impromptu tent city emerges seven days before ESPN and the Buckeyes come to town. Legends Todd Blackledge and Michael Robinson return to State College as broadcasters as Penn State helps NBC usher in a new era in college football.
In hindsight, sure, the season’s story crystalizes, but why not find the presence of mind to follow the thread as it unspools, game by game?
Since this year could be one of the great ones, we’ll also end up scoreboard watching, plotting the Lions’ path back to Pasadena or the Big Easy. Just like fans of old recall being glued to the screen watching Tennessee knock off second-ranked ‘Bama, LSU upset number one Florida, Texas Tech humble mighty Texas in Lubbock, or Iowa’s Kinnick voodoo bewitch a one-loss Michigan, our out-of-town rooting interests may take some surprising turns. Dare I suggest that we may even end up scanning the stat lines of top quarterbacks across the country, tallying up the tale of the tape for Drew Allar’s Heisman campaign? It’s all part of the package. So we have the national meta narrative, but there is also your own more intimate, personal version of the same story. I am urging you to pay acute attention to both.
If you’re reading this, I’ll assume that Penn State’s football season is going to weave its way into your life this Fall, and not just on game days. You’re going to listen to a podcast, see a newspaper headline (ok, a Tweet… ok… an X?), watch a Josh Pate clip on YouTube or a segment on BTN, or hell, perhaps even read one of these columns, and something is going to resonate. You’ll discuss the team with a friend or family member, and possibly you’ll bring it up. Maybe something great (or terrible, but I hope not) will happen in the week leading up to a game. Perhaps you’ll take a road trip – a pilgrimage back to Happy Valley, or to an away game in Champaign or Columbus or Detroit. From the way you’ll spend this Saturday morning to what you’re doing for the evening of January 8th and all that transpires in between, there will be innumerable little details that might turn out to be precious heirlooms if cared for properly.
Just as crucial as the places you go and things you do on your journey are those you’ll have alongside you, your traveling companions. No matter how you watch the West Virginia game and the contests that follow, you will be sharing the experience. On the road for work and watching at a sports bar, you track down the guy a few stools over who’s wearing the Penn State hat. At an Alumni Association watch party, you start making connections after a big move to a new city. You’re watching the game with your dad, just like you’ve always done, or you’re catching up with friends at the party with five flat screens and a Traeger. You’re touring through 10 different tailgates or back in the familiar spot as if you’d never left. Maybe you’re among the fortunate few who’ll watch live from inside Beaver Stadium: a first-timer checking off a life goal, an undergrad standing and screaming from start to finish, a season ticket holder happily embracing the couple who’s sat in front of you for decades. Whether you’re strengthening a lifelong friendship or making a single-serving friend, you’ll be sharing the common bond of fandom and all it encompasses. This will happen every week. You’ll be making memories together.
And don’t forget the players, our fellow Penn Staters. For as much as the transfer portal’s open market may have altered the dynamics of the player-school-fan relationship, these are still mostly young men who chose Penn State and stuck with it. Each one is adding new contours to their own life story. For Dante Cephas, 2023 will always represent his jump from the cradle of Kent State’s campus to the sport’s biggest stage. Olu Fashanu will gauge the wisdom of deferring NFL riches for a final year in Happy Valley, while his former linemate Landon Tengwall will begin sorting the messy challenge of life after football. You’ll remember watching their exploits and cheering them on.
And as we all are experiencing these personal journeys, we are also then connected to broader, intersecting storylines that link generations and blur boundaries. Renowned chemist Evan Pugh heeding the call of his native Pennsylvania to sail across the Atlantic and found a college amid cornfields and cow pastures, sons of steelworkers spellbound by the sales pitch of a wily would-be lawyer turned football coach, raucous fans dumping a car into the duck pond, lining College Avenue for a national championship parade, or flooding onto the field after an upset of Ohio State, a wide-eyed student less than two weeks into the college experience emerging from a dark tunnel (ok, vomitory) to behold her first ever White Out (ok, “Helmet Stripe Game”). They’re all there, ghosts of what came before and what yet may be, countless strand upon strand of stories old and new – stories of people and the place they came to love – that brush gently up against you like the evening breeze off Mount Nittany.
All of that is yours, your birthright, to enjoy for free (plus potentially the cost of a Nittany Lion Club contribution, tickets, parking, concessions, gas, a two-night minimum hotel stay, a generous donation to the Happy Valley United NIL collective, the cable sports package, and a Peacock subscription). Take full advantage of it. I am challenging you to experience this campaign in more meaningful ways than any that came before it. I am inviting you to enjoy what I believe may be one of the greatest Autumns the Nittany Valley has ever seen on a deeper level. Even if I’m wrong, and the football part goes off the rails, the effort will be worth it regardless.
I mentioned my friend Jason earlier in part because the editors have foolishly granted me total carte blanche, so I am immediately abusing it to gratuitously name drop personal acquaintances. But also because, while my friends and I will never get to see or hear him again in this life, every time we stupidly assemble in a grass field or gravel lot outside Beaver Stadium for between five and 12 hours of laughter, drinking, and endless rounds of flip cup, we keep him alive. As long as we keep coming back, he’s still there with us.
This is my reminder to you: You have that person or those people right now, those whose memory is sustained at least in part by your fidelity to the rituals of Penn State football. You were lucky to have the time you did with them, and now your recall of it is priceless. What’s more, there are others (I hope many others, for each of you reading) whose presence you’re blessed to have in your life right now and who somehow understand your passion for this annual tradition. It could be a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a child, an old roommate or teammate, a childhood friend, or a co-worker (ok, probably not). At some point this season, something incredible is going to happen, a play that makes it into every hype video and gets replayed endlessly in pregame and during timeouts for the next 50 years, and today I am imploring you: When it does, steal just a moment to look over at that person, or those people, and burn the record of them in that moment, that precious snapshot in time, into your long-term memory. In the years to come, when you recount the journey of the 2023 Penn State football season, your enjoyment of it will be enriched immeasurably by the inclusion of those who shared it with you.
So steel your mettle, gird your loins, restore your booze tolerance, and tip your glass to going 1-0 each week – however you experience the journey of the next five months, it will shape your own personal story; enjoy the vibrancy of the moments as they happen and you’ll treasure the vividness of the memories forever after. If your expectation is that the players leave it all out on the field each week, then you should follow suit. Live the hell out of every moment of this season – from the tense to the jubilant to the mundane – the stories of each passing Fall in Happy Valley, the most historic ones in particular, demand nothing less.
Three for the Road:
- Tony Rojas will make plays (plural) while the result is still in question. It’s no revelation to anyone who’s closely followed offseason news that the freshman linebacker is turning heads, but will he hear his name called by Rodney Martin outside garbage time of game one? It’s a long season, and if the staff gets the chance to save wear on Abdul Carter or Curtis Jacobs while unleashing one of their newest weapons, I say they take advantage right away, and Rojas rises to the occasion.
- Watch for the impact of State’s tight ends blocking in the run game. Add “willing and capable blockers” to the accolades for this celebrated position group. The Lions ought to be able to exploit an undersized Mounties defense on the ground, and look for the TEs to get involved in “heavy” packages. Putting these dynamic talents on the field in traditional run situations perfectly sets up the availability of mismatch nightmares off play action.
- A placekicker and/or punter will do at least one thing that provokes acid reflux. James Franklin’s refusal to confirm a starting QB is trolling, and he’s been committed to the bit. His reticence to name the starting specialists is not. If nary a punt or kick goes awry versus West Virginia (don’t count on it), it will be an extremely positive sign for what could be the sneaky Achilles Heel of this squad.
