As Good As It Gets

Clobbered by the Buckeyes yet again, Penn Staters enter this weekend struggling to reconcile their perceptions of the program with reality.

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A couple of years ago, one of my first assignments for this website was to write about the state of the football program heading into the 2021 season. Coming off the putrid 4-5 “fake season” of 2020, many were questioning whether James Franklin had lost the plot. I decided to come at it from both angles, examining both the reasonable argument that everything was fine, and most issues could be explained away by extraordinary circumstance, as well as the equally rational notion that the program was adrift.

One particular sentence from that article came back to me this weekend as I pondered how to fill this space in the wake of last Saturday’s crushing disappointment…

So it may just be that we’re Helen Hunt, the Fiesta Bowl is Jack Nicholson, and this is as good as it gets. [emphasis added]

I am, for the record, sensitive to the potentially obnoxious nature of quoting myself. In my defense, I first thought of using the line, and only later remembered that not only had I already written it somewhere before, but for this very website no less. In a way, it could not have been more appropriate. The pall that still hangs over Nittany Nation a week after Penn State’s desultory 20-12 loss to Ohio State carries with it a feeling of déjà vu. If I had doubled back around on myself and returned to the same conclusions I had reached before about James Franklin at Penn State, then that was only suitable for the sickening familiarity of the occasion.

For those unfamiliar, “As Good As It Gets” was a brilliantly-written 1998 film starring Hunt and Nicholson that garnered seven Academy Award nominations. The titular line comes from Nicholson, who portrays an aging, single author crippled by anxiety disorders. He is wealthy, famous, successful, but also isolated and lonely. The years keep passing and not much changes.  Musing aloud about his lot in life, he asks, “What if this is as good as it gets?” It’s a moment of vulnerable human honesty from a character whose on-screen persona is frequently unlikable, and it captures exactly how I feel about the prospect of yet another 10-2 season ending in a New Year’s Six bowl. Those are great accomplishments and not to be lightly dismissed, but weren’t we all expecting more?

The stakes of Penn State’s trip to the Horseshoe this season – for the program and its coach – cannot be overstated. The disappointing result notwithstanding, the Nittany Lions did bring their most gifted roster of the Franklin era, while the Buckeyes, especially with a few key players injured, were more exposed than they have been in a decade. Unique talents like Olu Fashanu and Curtis Jacobs took the extraordinary step of foregoing the NFL Draft to return to Happy Valley for a final shot at immortality. The four-team playoff era ending after 2023 meant that PSU had one final chance to avoid going down in college football history as the team that came closest to reaching the semifinals without ever actually making it there. For James Franklin, a win would have dispelled the rapidly solidifying narrative that, for all his talents, he cannot lead a team to victory when it matters most. It did not work out.

Afforded a clear and direct shot at greatness, the Nittany Lions shrank from the moment of truth. Despite a ferocious defense facing an unsettled Buckeyes quarterback and an offensive unit stocked with blue chip talent, the result of this Ohio State game was much like the six that came before it, and Penn State extended its program-record losing streak versus the Buckeyes to seven. For Penn Staters, it is beginning to feel like we are, like Sisyphus endlessly rolling his stone up a hill, destined to repeat a cycle that begins with renewed optimism, confident promises of better talent and stronger coaching, and ends with getting our brains beaten in by Ohio State, only to start the same doomed process all over again.

It is frustrating. It is dispiriting. And for anyone connected with Penn State football, the pain of last week’s missed opportunity will linger for a very long time. As playoff ambitions disintegrated, along with hopes for at last ascending, as Coach Franklin himself infamously described it, “from great to elite,” it became difficult to shake the sense that we may have seen the program’s ceiling.

That press conference talking point, itself precipitated by a loss to the Buckeyes at Beaver Stadium, dates back six years. For all the tangible progress made since then and everything going for this year’s team, none of it amounted to much of anything when it truly mattered out on the field or when the scoreboard read all zeroes.

If not now, when?

The unlikely path to achieving anything beyond a “nice,” but somewhat unsatisfying season begins with the formality of beating Indiana (the most you’ll get out of me about this week’s opponent) and eventually brings us to a home date with Michigan that few believe Penn State can win. Perhaps in a few weeks I will be waxing poetic about the heroic feats and unlikely events that resurrected a lost season, but in all likelihood, I will be wracking my brain for ways to keep a demoralized readership engaged through Rutgers and Michigan State. We need to begin grappling with the real possibility that this is as good as gets.

Nevertheless, there are only a handful of college football programs in America where dreams of a national championship are anything more than flights of fancy. Penn State, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, remains one of them. The expansion of the playoff field to include 12 teams, and growth of the Big Ten conference with the addition of USC, Oregon, Washington, and UCLA, could dramatically reframe the paradigm of how we think about success here at Penn State. Whatever his faults, James Franklin has more than earned the chance to show us what we can accomplish in this altered landscape and deserves our faith and support as he makes the attempt.

Back to the movie; Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall is eccentric, neurotic, and kind of a dick. Helen Hunt’s character, a single mother caring for a sick child, has her own hang-ups and challenges. (Incidentally, they’re great and won Oscars for their performances – if you need to get your mind totally off football for a night, it’s worth the rental.) Both ultimately realize that for all their quarrels and shortcomings, they may be better off together than apart. Maybe there’s a lesson there for all of us.

In keeping with the motif of cyclical repetition, I will close this week’s piece as I began it, by quoting/paraphrasing that 2021 season preview:

There are roughly three to four dozen college football fan bases who would kill to be in our position right now (and half a hundred more who’d first have to discover how to care before the envy set in) and only six or seven who definitely wouldn’t agree to trade places. We have a great head coach who seems like as good a person as you’re going to find in his vile profession, who recruits like a maniac, who’s won way more than he’s lost everywhere he’s gone, whose players don’t get in trouble off the field and do graduate early, and who seems to genuinely live the values of The Grand Experiment that made us care so much in the first place.

 Life is good when you’re a Penn Stater, folks. So get to the tailgate lots early on [Indiana] Saturday and have a Coke (or a Pepsi, if you’re an Athletics employee) and a smile, because when the sun rises over Mount Nittany, you’ll remember why this place is and always will be Happy Valley.

Wise words that still ring as true now as when they were written over two years ago, and if indeed we never progress beyond likable players winning lots of games with a decent human at the helm in one of the most pleasant places on Earth, then there are worse fates that might befall us. But no one, from our head coach on down to the fans, should be blamed for expecting more and experiencing deep dissatisfaction when we fall short.

Three for the Road

1. It is past time for Kaden Saunders to see the field. Coming into last season, I thought he had a great chance to work into the mix as a true freshman, and he has consistently impacted games in limited action this year. As Penn State looks to boost productivity at the receiver spot, I’ll be surprised and disappointed if #7 doesn’t get more of a shot.

2. There really isn’t much Penn State can do against Indiana that will impact my thinking about the rest of the season. Any struggles can (and should) be chalked up to an understandable post-Ohio State hangover, while any offensive fireworks can be dismissed as exploitation of an inferior defense. The one thing the Lions can do versus IU to make an impression? Score touchdowns on their first two possessions.

3. A theory that has recently gained some popular traction involves the concept that what we perceive as “reality” is, in fact, a sophisticated computer simulation and that all of existence is really just advanced software. At this point, I’m very willing to entertain the notion that the maddeningly repetitive feel of these annual beatdowns from Ohio State are, in fact, nothing more than the byproduct of lazy coders.