In hiring – and firing – Mike Yurcich, James Franklin demonstrated commendable willingness to take bold action, but the pressure is on to get the next move right.

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For proof of the critical importance assistant coaches play at elite college football programs, you needed only to look to the opposing sidelines at Beaver Stadium in the game that ultimately cost now-former Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich his job.

The latest ludicrous turn of this largely ridiculous Michigan sign-stealing saga saw the Big Ten hand down an 11^th-hour suspension for Jim Harbaugh while the Wolverines’ team flight was en route to State College. A legal Hail Mary by Michigan failed to yield a stay of execution, so the nation’s third-ranked team took on by far their stiffest test of the season without their head coach – insert joke about James Franklin getting outcoached by a team without a coach. But therein lies the point.

Saturday began Michigan’s second stint playing games without Harbaugh after he served out a school-imposed three-game suspension to start the year, and neither time has his absence disrupted the team’s collision course with the playoffs. Current allegations aside, Harbaugh has clearly done a good enough job building a culture and setting a standard that now, even in the stretch run of the title hunt, he can comfortably hand the keys to his assistants and the machine keeps humming. It offers a painfully instructive reminder of why James Franklin makes aggressive moves in pursuit of upgrading his staff.

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As controversy swirls around the mighty Michigan juggernaut, Penn State can play the role of avenging vigilante while defying the odds and expectations to save its season.

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Everyone has given up.

Perhaps, like many of your fellow Penn Staters and practically all of the national commentariat, you threw your hands up in disgust as the listless Nittany Lions were pushed around the field in Columbus a few weeks ago and wrote the rest of the season off then and there, resigned to another year of being “great, but not elite.” Maybe you shook off the Ohio State doldrums and held fast to the lingering hope that another shot at a top-four opponent, no matter how daunting the foe, held the potential to revitalize a season full of promise.

Regardless, precious few among even Penn State’s most devoted followers, and practically no one outside the borders of Nittany Nation, holds a rational belief that the home team will triumph this weekend. The prevailing sentiment among our fanbase seems to be an acceptance that PSU missed its best shot at besting the Buckeyes in at least a decade and now faces a far stiffer test against a team that throttled the Lions last season (except in the Smuckers & Skippy-scented halftime tunnel) and boasts a long and brutal history of torturing Penn State in ways both subtle and gross. Those who profess a belief that Penn State will win the game rely heavily on the sort of blind faith that makes sports fandom beautiful.

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Closing in on the backend of a “two-game season,” Penn State can rewrite or reinforce the emerging narrative about the team versus the Terrapins.

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Did we just witness a turning point in Penn State football history?

Some readers seemed to really enjoy my slipping in a reference to simulation theory at the very end of last week’s column, so let’s start things out this time around with another popular artifact of theoretical physics for the everyman and invoke the concept of many worlds: Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a timeline where the closing sequence of last week’s Indiana game is destined for enshrinement in program lore.

Back in Beaver Stadium a week removed from a devastating loss to Ohio State in Columbus that all but crushed their playoff hopes and touched off a week of national criticism, the Nittany Lions led lowly Indiana by only three points late in the game. After setting an NCAA record with the most passing attempts prior to throwing his first interception, Drew Allar appeared to bury his struggling team by finding the worst possible moment, at the worst part of the field, against the worst possible opponent to toss that fateful pick.

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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]

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More than a decade of nearly uninterrupted futility makes victory in Columbus feel out of reach, but Penn Staters should dare to imagine a bigger picture.

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This column aspires to frame a “travel narrative” around the journey of Penn State’s 2023 football season, a chronicle of the Nittany Lions’ path toward their destination parceled out over 12 – plus three?? – installments (we won’t count the Bye week’s digression about scheduling Pitt).

For the most ardent enthusiasts of college football, one of its most beautiful aspects is the way in which the seven-day cycles linking each game day to the next take on their own character. The previous week’s result, the upcoming opponent, and the many tempests in the internet teapot that suddenly bubble up (and disappear just as quickly) combine to imbue each successive week with a unique flavor. Already this year, we’ve had enough James Franklin press conference gems to fill an entire season, not to mention the student section service dog (what a good boy!).

We remember the outcomes, but often the events between kickoffs become just as much as part of the story. Taken together, they help us mark the passage of time in our lives.

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Among a slew of comfortable, forgettable wins against schools from Indiana, many Big Ten-era Homecoming games have found their way into Penn State history.

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For those fortunate few who call Happy Valley home, the rhythm of life – whether you like it or not – inevitably attunes to the ebb and flow of the campus calendar. As someone who very intentionally chose to take root in a college town, I love it.  There are two times of the year in particular – Commencement and Homecoming – that cause me to reflect on how my experience differs from most.

In mid-May, as I watch young graduates who’ve come to the end of their four(-ish) years in the Nittany Valley pack up whatever contents of their apartments won’t be left out on the curb and drive off toward whatever’s next, I always think to myself, “I wonder what that’s like.”

You see, many moons ago, I took a course taught by Steve Manuel, who some alums may remember from his teaching, and many football fans will recognize, even if they don’t realize it, from his years’ worth of game day photography, as featured by The Football Letter among others. Steve is a Marine. Smart, no-nonsense guy; good sense of humor, loves Penn State. In class, he told us Happy Valley was “the Good Ship Lollipop,” a fantasy land largely divorced from the harsh realities of the outside world. He drew the contrast to be instructive and always with an air of cynicism, but I also detected (or imagined I did) a hint of affection accompanying it.

It got me thinking. “If you find yourself lucky enough to be a passenger on the Good Ship Lollipop, maybe the savvy move is to just never disembark.” And so here I am, over 20 years later, and happy as a pig in slop.

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Despite the insistence of some cantankerous columnists, Penn State hasn’t exactly shied away from facing their former archrival.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: If any of the charming folks who represent the Pitt fanbase online come across this week’s column, it will undoubtedly provoke some comments that they are living “rent free” in my head.

Don’t get it twisted; invited guests don’t have to pay rent.

I grew up with the Penn State-Pitt rivalry and remain steadfast in my nostalgia for intense battles played out in the late November chill. I’m writing this piece because Pittsburgh columnists setting Twitter ablaze with rhetorical Molotov cocktails and Penn Staters responding in kind is all in good fun.

To me, the gridiron animus between two great Pennsylvania universities symbolizes everything good about college football. If I had my druthers, the teams would play every year, ideally at the end of the regular season. Based on many in-person and virtual interactions with many Penn State alumni and fans over many years, I am confident that this puts me in the minority.

As far as I can tell, the number of Penn State fans who remember or care about a time when Pitt-Penn State belonged in the same conversation with Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State-Michigan, or Florida-Florida State dwindles with each passing year. The Nittany Lions are about to begin their fourth decade of membership in the ever-expanding Big Ten, and the prospect of future games against USC or Oregon generates much more excitement than the memory of dormant rivalries from the analog age. Today’s college seniors were born after 9/11. Games involving Tony Dorsett and Dan Marino mean little to them. Much of Nittany Nation has moved on.

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It may not be quite what we all expected, but the 4-0 Nittany Lions are winning in an impressive fashion that will serve them well down the line.

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“I run six plays, split veer. It’s like Novocain. Just give it time, it always works.”

– Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, “Remember the Titans”

“There’s no greater feeling than to be able to move a man from Point A to Point B against his will.”

– NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Russ Grimm

“I feel like everybody would prefer to have the one- or two-play drive… But it is a different type of satisfaction when you’re out there, and you’re 10, 12, 15 plays in… because you feel like whatever you could do, they can’t stop it.”

– Penn State offensive guard Saleem Wormley

These are two of my favorite football quotes (even though the latter is from a Pitt alum – nobody’s perfect, after all – and the former is fiction) followed by a key member of the 2023 Nittany Lions summing up how it felt to smother the Iowa Hawkeyes with methodical brute force. Taken together, they form a kind of short story about the first quarter of Penn State’s season.

To the extent some fans worried or grumbled after the Lions took apart West Virginia on national television to open this year’s campaign, it can be traced to the ways in which a dominant 38-15 outing still fell short of expectations rooted in preseason hype. In the eight months that elapsed between Penn State’s Rose Bowl win over Utah and the end of Summer training camp, this year’s team had been built up so much in people’s minds that some folks seemed to be expecting to see the 1994 offense and 1986 defense paired together from the opening snap. When every pass rush didn’t result in a sack and every Nick Singleton carry a 60-yard scamper, there was a palpable sense of, “What gives?”

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Don’t bet on an easy outing against Iowa, the trickster antagonist that’s tormented Penn State.

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Even in these declining days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which captivated audiences and ruled the box office during the 2010s, if you bring up the character of Loki to most people, it conjures Tom Hiddleston’s performance as chief antagonist in the first Avengers film and a recurring enemy (but occasional ally) of Earth’s mightiest heroes. The comic book creation on which the movie character is based was derived from actual Norse mythology, in which Loki is typically the mischief maker and obstacle to the forces of good, but every so often, the critical keystone to advancing the hero’s progress.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the mythological figure who inspired the modern version we know from comics and cinema:

Scholars have debated Loki’s origins and role in Norse mythology, which some have described as that of a trickster god. Loki’s relation with the gods varies by source; he sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves maliciously towards them.

On the big screen, Loki earned his status as the archnemesis viewers loved to hate by attempting to conquer the planet and subjugate humanity, repeatedly betraying his heroic brother Thor, and generally making life miserable for all our favorite superheroes. Despite this track record of deception and destruction, the on-screen character has kept true to his real-life inspiration by emerging as an unlikely anti-hero in later installments of a meta-narrative that spans films and streaming shows.

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On the road with trends, streaks, records, and unsettled scores in a game that’s become overrated for being “underrated.”

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“Penn State better not sleep on Illinois.”

Trust me; they won’t.

Over the course of the offseason, what began as the go-to highbrow talking point on the Nittany Lions’ 2023 slate slowly morphed into the laziest take of the litter: this Week 3 road trip’s status as a classic “trap game.” Setting aside the flaws inherent to the argument at its outset – Illinois saw terrific defensive backs selected in the first three rounds of April’s NFL draft along with offensive lynchpin RB Chase Brown; this is not a program that simply reloads – and the team’s less than intimidating 1-1 start to the season, the sheer volume of “trap game” takes alone was enough to ensure Illinois isn’t sneaking up on anybody. At some point, this game became overrated for being “underrated.”

So let’s dispense with all that clap trap (game). If this team even approaches what we and most pundits believe them to be, they won’t lose to the Illini. But since this column is all about setting the weekly narrative, here are three other storylines I’m tracking as the Nittany Lions prepare to don their (as the kids say) icy road whites for the first time in 2023…

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