So, uh, 1-0?

Penn State put together all the ingredients for a feel-good Saturday after an occasionally sloppy but largely impressive opening win at West Virginia: a beautiful, sunny September afternoon, a MAC opponent they should handle without much difficulty, and a large home crowd full of fans who were ready to be optimistic about this team’s long-term chances, and perhaps drink a $12 beer or three.

Instead, the Nittany Lions learned some hard truths about themselves, the first and most significant being that the perceived easier path to the expanded playoff won’t matter much if they don’t figure some things out along that path the next few weeks, and the second being, for the first time in a while, that most of those things concerned the defense.

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Sometimes college football games — especially the season-openers — can feel as if they’re taking forever. In some cases, when you get a two-hour weather delay, that feeling is multiplied by a hundred.

In their much-anticipated debut under the crafty guidance of Andy Kotelnicki in Saturday’s game at West Virginia, and in the midst of a five-hour and 45-minute affair that checked both of the boxes above, Drew Allar and the Penn State offense needed only a handful of plays that lasted a handful of seconds to dispatch a fired-up group of Mountaineers and their, um, endearing fan base, and in the process feed Lion fans watching there and at home with some needed optimism.

On paper, the 2024 offense isn’t much different than the 2023 version; if anything, it’s worse. The offensive line is rebuilding, the group of reliable receiving options appears to be entirely composed of Tre Wallace, the dynamic tight end due of Theo Johnson and Tyler Warren is now just Warren, and Drew Allar and Beau Pribula are still doing the QB shuffle that seems to be as much of a threat to the offense’s own rhythm as it is to the defense.

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Writing a Penn State football column based on a (series of) Taylor Swift song(s) is akin to bringing an opera fan to a monster truck rally, but it’s August, and the season can’t start soon enough. The most popular pop artist in the world is currently in the midst of her Eras Tour, a tribute to the various evolutions of her music.

With Penn State about to kick off a season with its sixth offensive coordinator in the last 10 years, it’s worth looking back at the differences between the Nittany Lions’ offensive eras and what clues they might provide on how 2024 might go. With apologies to Taylor Swift Penn State fans no one, here goes nothing.

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Sisyphus was a king in ancient Greece who ruled with an iron fist. The gods, angry at him for killing visitors to his land, punished him by forcing him to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down each time it approached the summit, for eternity.

James Franklin has now ruled the kingdom of Penn State football for more than a decade, and each time the Nittany Lions appear as though they’re about to reach the summit of college football’s elite, they backslide. The 52-year-old coach has proven quite adept at pushing the proverbial boulder most of the way up the hill, as evidenced by both the four top-10 finishes in the past eight years and the team’s current preseason ranking of No. 8. That he hasn’t gotten it the whole way up, and down the other side, is an increasing sore spot for his kingdom, and each year that passes causes a few more observers to wonder how close to Sisyphus’ plight Franklin truly is.

The coming 2024 season, however, threatens to break the cycle, one way or the other. There is a chance, a not-that-crazy chance, that a few things that haven’t clicked for Penn State during the last few years will click, and a spot in the expanded playoff is there for the taking. The Nittany Lions have one of the nation’s most talented running back rooms, a quarterback who at least has the potential to be more dynamic than he showed in a productive but frustrating first year as a starter, and an offensive coordinator who has a proven proclivity for getting dudes into open spaces with the football. The defense is once again deep and athletic, dotted with potential All-Americans and led by a savvy veteran defensive coordinator who has, like that aforementioned offensive coordinator, done some impressive stuff with a lot less talent than he’ll have at his disposal this fall.

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Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2024 Spring Football Coverage is brought to you by Happy Valley United – the NIL collective representing every Penn State student-athlete. CLICK HERE to join the team and pledge your support.

Saturday’s Blue-White Game was a terrific opportunity for Penn State fans watching from the stands and on television to learn about the schemes of new coordinators Andy Kotelnicki and Tom Allen, which will likely play a key role in the team’s level of success this autumn.

Of course, James Franklin had no intention of giving future opponents any sort of hint about those schemes, so this game, like so many spring scrimmages before it, was more of an organized workout than any sort of competition, especially considering a bulk of likely starters were out nursing injuries and, you know, you’re not allowed to touch the quarterbacks.

But even if Saturday wasn’t helpful from an Xs and Os standpoint, it was useful to see which players looked like they belonged. And the Nittany Lions had more than a few of them on both sides of the ball.

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The most impressive thing about Drew Allar in 2023 might have been the way the then-sophomore quarterback owned up for his and his team’s few failures in the post-game media room. Often emotional but always accountable, Allar showed a maturity beyond his years and earned respect from both grumpy sportswriters and, far more importantly, his teammates.

The next step in Allar’s ongoing development is having to do that less often this fall.

Look, I said a few weeks ago, and still believe, that Andy Kotelnicki is the guy who will have the largest influence on the type of season the Nittany Lions have, but close behind is the team’s QB1. At least some of the maturity Allar displayed when talking to reporters is going to have to translate to how he handles rotating safeties and blitzing linebackers and how he handles both deep shots and short throws if Penn State is going to maximize its potential.

Wow, yes, the starting quarterback playing well is a key to the season. Very astute analysis there.

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Since the end of the 2021 season, two things have been true about Penn State football.

The first is that the Nittany Lions have been steadily improving as a program. The second is that they’ve been at least a step behind the two major programs in their conference.

With several traditional Pac 12 powers rotating into the Big Ten and onto Penn State’s schedule this fall, and Michigan (at least temporarily) rotating off of it, it is worth examining whether there will be more teams standing between the Lions and a playoff during the next few seasons or if the influx of new teams could disrupt the balance of power in the conference.

USC, which hosts Penn State on Oct. 12, lost five games with the nation’s top quarterback at the helm in 2023. UCLA, which visits Beaver Stadium on Oct. 5, fired Chip Kelly after six seasons in which the Bruins lost at least four games. Washington, which comes to State College on Nov. 9, is coming off its best season in years but lost both head coach Kalen DeBoer and quarterback Michael Penix Jr. Oregon, which isn’t on the Lions’ schedule this fall, is coming off a 12-2 season, though it must replace quarterback Bo Nix.

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“Moving the sticks” is typically a colloquialism for “getting first downs.” For the Penn State football team in 2024, moving the Sticks also means that No. 11 (a metaphorical pair of sticks, for those who don’t speak LaVar-ese), Abdul Carter, is moving from linebacker to defensive end.

This could mean some nightmares for opposing offensive tackles, but it is also symbolic of a Penn State team that will be experiencing a great deal of change this year in terms of both personnel and scheme. While many of these changes, including Carter’s intriguing position switch, seem like they have a good chance of being positive, the sheer number of them will more than likely lead to some growing pains for the Nittany Lions as they enter the “Less Exclusive Playoff Invite” era of college football.

Penn State has three new coordinators. Though James Franklin intimidated recently that this might mean not that many more new plays but simply new ways of naming them, that’s still a lot of learning for, well, the entire roster to do during the remainder of the spring, preseason camp and likely at least a few games into the season.

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Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023-24 Sunday Column is brought to you by Happy Valley United – the NIL collective representing every Penn State student-athlete. CLICK HERE to join the team and pledge your support.

Year One of the Mike Rhoades Era at Penn State wrapped up on Thursday in the second round of the Big Ten Tournament, when a potentially game-winning 3-pointer by Puff Johnson failed to connect, leaving the Nittany Lions two points short of an Indiana team they’d beaten twice during the regular season. The loss left Penn State at 16-17 for the year, with 10 of those victories coming against conference opponents.

In the most basic sense, it was a step back from the previous season, when the Micah Shrewsberry- and Jalen Pickett-led Nittany Lions caught fire down the stretch and advanced to the Round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament. In the more nuanced and perhaps more important senses, it was an encouraging start to the next chapter of program history after Shrewsberry had metaphorically set fire to the previous chapter when he bolted for Notre Dame shortly after the season.

Rhoades was left with just three returning scholarship players — Kanye Clary, Demetrius Lilley and Jameel Brown — who had accounted for 5% of the team’s minutes played and 5% of its scoring in 2022-23. Those players totaled 17% of the minutes and 22% of the scoring this season, numbers that dropped significantly when Clary left/was shown the door in February (more on this in a bit). Shrewsberry also took the entirety of Penn State’s Class of 2023 with him, leaving the transfer portal as Rhoades’ lone option to fill out the roster, on incredibly short notice.

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A not-so-long time from now, in a college football galaxy not so far-fetched …

It’s 2032. Penn State, having dispatched Michigan, Ohio State, USC, Oregon, Boise State, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Florida State, Central Michigan, BYU, and Navy to win the Big Ten (which now includes 36 teams), clinches a 2 seed in the 16-team playoff.

Nittany Lion fans are excited for many reasons, including that it represents the program’s first conference title since 2016, and that Penn State will get to host at least one playoff game in Beaver Stadium, which now seats a cozy 85,000 thanks to a six-year renovation process that cost a mere $3.2 billion. Playoff tickets cost $450-700 apiece, which represents only a slight per-game increase from the season ticket package. Plans are underway to erect a 2,000-square foot sportsbook on the concourse, which is expected to generate an additional $2 million in revenue for the university each year.

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