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Penn State’s Little Engine That Could ran into a tank on Sunday in the form of Purdue big man Zach Edey.

And then the Nittany Lions called an Uber and nearly got to their destination anyway before falling 67-65 to the Boilermakers in the Big Ten championship game.

On paper, the final result made sense considering that Purdue had been the best team in the conference the entire season and also considering that the best center in the country, while a difficult matchup for any college team, was an essentially impossible matchup for a team that plays a good chunk of its minutes without a true big on the floor.

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“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

 -Thomas Carlyle, 19^th-century Scottish philosopher

The past is a wasteland. The future is uncertain and a lot more ominous than it was a few weeks ago.

The Penn State men’s basketball present, however, is something to be savored.

The Nittany Lions, essentially left for dead after blowing a huge second-half lead in an eventual loss to Rutgers on Feb. 26, are firmly in the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2011 and will play Purdue on Sunday for the Big Ten Tournament title. That’s awesome in and of itself but what’s even better is that very few teams in the country are playing better ball (at least for stretches) than the Nittany Lions are at the moment.

What we’re seeing is a run like few Penn State teams have ever experienced, and Nittany Lion fans should soak it up for all it’s worth, for a few reasons.

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The NFL Combine is where the (apologies to Rick James) superfreak athletes of college football separate themselves from the mere everyday freaks, where (apologies to Eric Roberts) the best of the best can go from a fringe first-rounder to a top-10 pick, from a fringe draftee to a second-day selection, and earn themselves a good deal of money in the process.

Penn State has had its fair share of superfreak performances at the combine over the years, from Parsons to Barkley to… Apke and from dozens of other players who may not have made the same type of headlines but, whether it was with an impressive jump or a surprising 40 time, improved their stock during the week.

It’s been a different story for the seven Nittany Lions at this year’s combine. None of them would have qualified as true athletic freaks going in, and they largely did very little to change that with their respective performances.

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I didn’t see an All-American the first time I saw Jalen Pickett play.

It was one of the earlier games of the 2021-22 season, a sleepy November weeknight affair against a winless St. Francis Brooklyn squad. Pickett was 1-of-7 from the field and finished with four points, one board and three assists in 32 minutes. But it wasn’t the skimpy stat line that bothered me. It was his slow, deliberate approach; a lot of dribbles without a lot of movement toward the basket. I figured he was another small-conference transfer who was going to have trouble adjusting to the speed and length of Big Ten defenses.

A year and a half later, that same player is the hottest, arguably most unguardable player (not named Zach Edey) in the conference, and he’s dragging a team without a lot of other reliable options on offense and a less-than-lockdown defense toward an NCAA Tournament berth.

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Penn State on Friday announced potential plans to consider a project of unspecified scope or cost – pending approval, of course.

Sigh.

However, in making this nowhere-near-definitive announcement during a board of trustees meeting and subsequent media release, university president Neeli Bendapudi confirmed that Beaver Stadium is going to receive a renovation rather than a replacement, which was not exactly surprising but probably nonetheless needed saying. Also of interest in the release was that “the project also has the potential to expand use beyond football game days.”

More on that second part in a bit. As for the big sorta-news, Bendapudi, newly minted athletic director Patrick Kraft, and the various other Penn State administrators who will be involved in the project will have some interesting decisions to make about the future of what has become, for better and worse, one of the most iconic venues in all of sport. And all that might be at stake is the loyalty of one of the largest and most passionate fan bases in the world.

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Micah Shrewsberry has done a lot of good stuff since he took over as the Penn State men’s basketball coach last year. He’s completed a couple of solid-to-strong recruiting classes, used the transfer portal to fill in some significant gaps left by departures that were no fault of his own, and, if you’re watching closely, has shown a grasp of Xs and Os that exceeds that of most of his Nittany Lion coaching predecessors.

However, he seems to have fallen into the trap that ensnared many of those predecessors and a sizable chunk of Penn State’s not-so-sizable men’s hoops fan base—namely, he thinks Big Ten officials are out to get him and his team.

To which I would say:

1. No they’re not.
2. If they are, the coach and his team need to try a few other tactics

The Nittany Lions’ mid-winter nose dive continued Saturday with a 74-68 loss at Maryland, their fourth straight defeat and fifth in the last six games. And a couple of quick looks at the final box underscore what have been two sticking points for Shrewsberry for the bulk of the season. The Terrapins shot 23 free throws to Penn State’s four. And Jalen Pickett, the do-it-all senior guard who spends more time with the ball in his hands than any other Nittany Lion, went to the free-throw line once, bringing his total free-throw attempts over the four-game losing streak to … one.

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Recruiting is not fantasy football, where a coach can look at his roster, see which areas are lacking, and acquire new players who will be immediate upgrades at those specific positions. They have to recruit the best players in the class regardless of position, and while that doesn’t mean signing 12 scholarship linemen and six running backs in the same class, for example, rather than a group spread more evenly over several positions, it doesn’t mean they’re going to fill the positions of need in every cycle, either.

Sometimes, though, the best players wind up being the players a program needs the most, and a glance at the top of Penn State’s Class of 2023 hints that the Nittany Lions could very well have gotten much better at a few positions at which they’ve struggled for several years.

The two highest-ranked players in the class, both top 60 players nationally according to the On3 consensus rankings, are offensive linemen Jven Williams and Alex Birchmeier. Two of the next seven highest-ranked signees are linebackers Tony Rojas and Ta’Mere Robinson.

Neither position group has lived up to its respective expectations in recent years at Penn State. Linebacker U did have Micah Parsons terrorizing Big Ten backfields for a couple of seasons, but prior to Parsons being named to the all-conference first team in 2019, the last Penn State linebacker to make that list was Mike Hull in 2014. (Rising sophomore Abdul Carter might have something to say about that this autumn.)

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It’s the time of year when many first-year college basketball players hit the freshman wall, that real or imagined phenomenon that is characterized by tired legs, questionable decision-making, and generally a lesser quality of play than the same player showed from November through mid-January.

Penn State’s freshmen haven’t logged nearly enough minutes to hit that freshman wall, which is good for them but not great for the present or future of the program.

The Nittany Lions, 13-7 overall and 4-5 in conference play entering Sunday’s game against Michigan, are very much in the NCAA Tournament mix thanks to one of the most experienced lineups in the entire nation, let alone the Big Ten. Jalen Pickett, Seth Lundy, Myles Dread, Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter have already played in a combined 633 games, and their bodies and their minds have gone through so many reps that any one of them would not be out of place as a fourth assistant coach.

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If you made it through any of Penn State’s 13 games this season without the words “Drew Allar” escaping your lips or even running through your brain, you are likely part of a small minority of Nittany Lion fans who, despite what they might have thought about Sean Clifford, were and remain excited to see what the young stud QB can do when given full-time control of the offense.

With Clifford out of the picture and Allar the presumed favorite to answer that question, a couple of related queries spring to mind as the dust settles following the close of the first portal window:

Who the hell is he going to throw to? And who is going to coach them?

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Micah Shrewsberry, in the parlance of our times, has got that dawg in him.

The, um, underdawg, that is.

“I’m one of the ultimate underdog kind of guys,” the Nittany Lions’ basketball coach told The Athletic’s Brian Hamilton last spring. “Toughness will make up for it. We may not be as big as other people. Just be tougher than them.”

This quote, occurring more in the postseason of Shrewsberry’s first year at Penn State than the preseason of his second, was more than prophetic about the current rendition of the Nittany Lions. The roster, as he noted, does not have a lot of size, and Shrewsberry has arguably made it even smaller by eschewing the center position altogether for large stretches of the game. Six-foot-4 senior wing Myles Dread, not unaccustomed to guarding fours at various points of his career, is often seen playing man defense on fives, including Purdue’s behemoth center Zach Edey.

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