It’s been a rough year for hoops fans in Bloomington. 

Indiana, which is currently without a head coach, is watching the NCAA Tournament from home for the fourth straight year (not counting the non-tournament 2020). Hoosier fans might have felt a bit of solace watching in-state rival Purdue get bounced out of the tournament by North Texas on Friday in overtime. 

Bet they weren’t nearly as happy about it as Penn State fans were, though.

The end of Purdue’s season officially marked the beginning of Micah Shrewsberry’s Penn State tenure, and he faces several short-term obstacles in what is arguably one of the nation’s toughest long-term challenges. Just about everyone in the Nittany Lions’ regular rotation hit the transfer portal last week, and though those departures most likely have a lot more to do with players’ feelings toward the administration rather than toward the new coach, it still leaves Shrewsberry with a ton of roster-building to do.

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The Big Ten is a tough basketball conference on a yearly basis, and just might be the toughest conference in the country this year. Five Big Ten teams are currently in the AP Top 25, with four of them in the top 10 and three in the top five. Joe Lunardi, who does this for a living, has nine of the league’s teams as 95% locks for the NCAA Tournament field.

Penn State, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, is not among those nine. Yes, the Nittany Lions should have and assuredly would have played in the tourney last year had one actually been played, but the last time they actually played in one, Talor Battle was a 22-year-old lead guard, not a 32-year-old assistant coach. The Nittany Lions have never, since joining the Big Ten in 1992, made the NCAA field in consecutive seasons, despite (or because of) playing in a conference that regularly sends at least seven teams to the tournament each year. 

As a long-suffering hoops program prepares to turn another page, it’s as good a time as any to ask: What should realistic and reasonable annual expectations be for Penn State men’s basketball?

Contending for conference championships?

Finishing in the top half of the league?

 Making the NCAA tournament in most years?

Making it every two or three years?

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Spring is arriving in State College, which usually means just a little bit more daylight when you leave work or class at 5 p.m. … and it’s still 35 degrees outside.

Fortunately for the Penn State football program, that also means spring practice is arriving again after an extra-long hiatus. The Nittany Lions will open their 15 allotted spring practices on March 15, and they can’t come soon enough for a group that, for both understandable and still-inexplicable reasons, came nowhere near its potential last fall. 

Yes, with apologies to Allen Iverson and Ted Lasso, we talkin’ bout practice, man. But there are several areas where the Nittany Lions should directly benefit from those workouts – whether they include a Blue-White Game or not – after they missed out on them last spring.

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It’s hard to argue that Penn State’s administration could have handled Patrick Chambers’ ouster much worse, and that we haven’t seen the last of its effects.

 The encouraging thing? In the grand scheme of things, it won’t matter much.

When athletic director Sandy Barbour chose to part ways with Chambers last October, it not only left Penn State’s players and remaining coaches scrambling to get ready for the season, without any real answers, but it also cast a pall over the Nittany Lions’ future, effectively putting the parking brake on recruiting. Jim Ferry and the remaining staff and the players deserve a lot of credit for a collective effort that won’t put Penn State in the NCAA Tournament but did earn the respect of fans and Big Ten peers.

Poorly timed as it may have been, though, Barbour’s decision also opened a door of opportunity for a program that can still count the highlights in its 29-year Big Ten history on one hand: The Nittany Lions now have the chance to hire a difference-making coach and, perhaps more importantly, the chance to pay him like one.

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What defines the health of a major college athletics program?

Is it success in every sport?

Is it the ability of its teams to generate revenue, through tickets sold or television contracts?

Is it the rate at which its student-athletes graduate?

Or is it simply how good its football team is?

The answers differ depending on whom you ask, and most athletic administrators would lobby for an “E. All of The Above” option. But if your answer to the last question is “pretty good” or better, chances are your athletic department is in good shape.

On Friday, Penn State’s Board of Trustees voted, by a comfortable margin, to push through plans for an eight-figure renovation of the Lasch Building, also known as Nittany Lion football headquarters.

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It’s Valentine’s Day, and Penn State football fans are in search of a new love – under center.

The recent departures of Will Levis and Micah Bowens leave the Nittany Lions with three scholarship quarterbacks – senior Sean Clifford, redshirt sophomore Ta’Quan Roberson and freshman Christian Veilleux. However bullish you are on Clifford’s chances of returning to his 2019 form or surpassing it in Mike Yurcich’s system, there is room there for an experienced transfer to either back up Clifford as Roberson and Veilleux develop or to claim the starting job outright.

As the staff mulls its options in the portal, including Tyler Shough, who announced his decision to transfer from Oregon on Friday, they would be wise to value certain traits over others – both those any transfer already possesses and those the coaches think they can develop.

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So the final results are in for Penn State’s Class of 2021. And they’re … not great, at least not by recent standards. The Nittany Lions’ 16 signees gave them the 21st-best class in the nation according to the 247Sports Composite Team Rankings, representing the program’s lowest ranking since 2014, when James Franklin wrapped up the 24th-ranked class in just his fourth week on the job.

When you consider not so much the circumstances but just how many different people were involved in assembling that class, though, it becomes a little more impressive.

This past week, tight ends coach Tyler Bowen took a job with the Jacksonville Jaguars, becoming the 13th Penn State assistant to leave the program – willingly or otherwise – since the end of the 2015 season. His replacement, former Nittany Lion offensive lineman Ty Howle, became the program’s sixth new assistant coach since the end of the 2019 season. Of the eight assistant coaches who came with Franklin to State College from Vanderbilt in 2014, only Brent Pry remains (as does Terry Smith, who was not with them at Vanderbilt but joined the Penn State staff that year).

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Penn State hosted No. 14 Wisconsin on Saturday and did what it has done for much of its basketball season – gave as good as it got against a quality Big Ten opponent. 

Then the Nittany Lions did what they haven’t often done – finished the job. And they did so mostly on the defensive end, which should be their emphasis going forward if they are going to have any shot at the NCAA Tournament.

Yes, the offense should be commended for this one, Myreon Jones (20 points), Izaiah Brockington (18) and John Harrar (17) in particular. The Nittany Lions put up 81 points on a good Badger defense, four more points than any Big Ten team had scored against that bunch previously this season.

But it was relentless, aggressive, smothering team defense, led by Harrar and tenacious point guard Jamari Wheeler, that allowed the Lions to take control of the game in the second half and hold on when the offense, as it has often done late in games this season, lost some rhythm.

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“Control freak” isn’t the nicest term to describe college football coaches, partly because half of that term is the word “freak” and partly because it paints the picture of a person who simply cannot have enough control, as if it is a commodity rather than a hard-to-define, relative construct, particularly as it pertains to several dozen giant young men beating the hell out of each other for three hours on 12-14 Saturdays each year.

So let us, then, refer to them instead as “organizational enthusiasts,” which is basically the same idea but suggests that the coaches are more about keeping order and consistency and less about being tyrants.

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Early January is usually a time of breath-holding for college football coaches and fans, as they wait to learn whether some of their top players are going to return or leave school early to pursue NFL dreams. This month was no different for Penn State coaches and fans, but resulted mostly in long, satisfied exhales.

Four Nittany Lions who are likely to play significant roles in 2021 — Jahan Dotson, Rasheed Walker, Tariq Castro-Fields, Jaquan Brisker – recently announced their decisions to return, which was not only likely wise for each of those respective players but, in each case, will also make things easier for their other returning teammates during what will be a pivotal year in State College.

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