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.

The most important person on the Penn State football team in 2024 isn’t Drew Allar.

It’s not Nick Singleton.

It’s not super-jacked linebacker-turned defensive end Abdul Carter, nor prodigal son wide receiver Julian Fleming.

It’s not James Franklin.

No, the one guy who will have the most influence on whether the Nittany Lions finally return to the national championship summit, make the elusive first playoff appearance, or have another so-so, ho-hum 10-3 campaign is Andy Kotelnicki, the new offensive coordinator.

Now, he’s going to need a lot of help, from all of the guys mentioned above, plus returning starters like Kaytron Allen and Tyler Warren and KJ Winston, and guys stepping into larger roles like Dani Dennis-Sutton and Drew Shelton and Tony Rojas, and from the other new coordinators, Tom Allen and Justin Lustig, and from strength coach Chuck Losey and his staff, and … you get it. Ultimate team sport, lots of moving parts, calories to consume and playbooks to study etc. etc.

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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.

5 + 7 = 14.

No, this isn’t the new math your kids are learning in schools, but it’s how math works in college football these days. Before the digital ink dried on the CFP press release announcing the new “5+7” 12-team format (five highest-ranked conference champs plus seven at-large berths) that model became instantly antiquated as word leaked that discussions on how to shift it to a 14-team field by as early as 2026 were already underway.

More teams, of course, playing for the biggest trophy at the end of the season means more money for a sport that is already Scrooge McDucking it, but it also means more opportunities for more teams. At least in theory.

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Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023 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.

The worst part of watching Penn State men’s basketball during its inglorious Big Ten history hasn’t been the frequent defeats as much as the predictability.

For so many years, in almost every game, you knew the basic range of outcomes — narrow win against an equally mediocre opponent, hard-fought loss against a mid-tier foe, lopsided defeat to a top-10 squad — almost before the game, hell, the season began. Sure, there were a few big upsets here and a couple blown games against less talented squads there, but for the most part, the Nittany Lions played to their level of talent, which was usually lacking compared to that of the majority of teams in their conference.

That has not been the case during the past month.

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Friday’s announcement of the Big Ten and SEC joining forces for an “advisory group” didn’t sound like so much of a declaration of all-out war against the NCAA as a mere reminder of the massive amount of firepower those conferences wield in the grand scheme of college athletics and college football in particular.

Commissioners Tony Petitti (pictured above next to NCAA president/frenemy Charlie Baker at a Senate Judiciary Hearing) and Greg Sankey used carefully parsed language in the press release, which also included phrases like “address the significant challenges facing college athletics and opportunities for the betterment of the student-athlete experience” and the group “will engage with other constituencies as necessary.”

Loosely translated, the 259-word release said, “Figure your stuff out, NCAA, or we’ll figure it out ourselves.”

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Sponsor: For The Blogy’s offseason 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.

Admit it, Penn State fans — part of you will miss Jim Harbaugh.

Perhaps no other modern coach, at any level of any sport, is as histrionic along the gameday sideline or as unabashedly corny/arrogant with the media. It’s awful to watch your team lose to his, and see the smirks and fist pumps that are the spoils of victory, but it makes it that much sweeter when your team beats his and you can see the scowl and misery on his face.

The other parts of you, and the rest of the Big Ten, won’t miss the former Michigan coach, who led his team to a natty this season when he wasn’t serving suspensions for recruiting violations … and sign-stealing and is now back in the NFL with the Chargers. Harbaugh’s departure is only one of several big changes to the Big Ten in 2024, but many of those changes could be taken advantage of by James Franklin’s Nittany Lions.

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The “alignment” between the Penn State football program and the athletic and university administrations James Franklin has so often talked about during the past couple of years, it would seem, is yielding some tangible results.

Reporting this week by Ben Jones at StateCollege.com showed that the Nittany Lions’ recruiting budget more than doubled over the past year, up to $2.8 million, a figure that would put a program that has perennially finished in the nation’s top 15 in recruiting rankings most years under Franklin among the five best in the nation in recruiting spending, which entails many things but was defined by the fiscal year report as costs of transportation, lodging and meals for recruits, costs of transportation for staff (including private aircraft), plus phone charges, postage, “and such.”

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Kalen DeBoer just reached the college football coaching summit.

After leading Washington to the national championship game, DeBoer will succeed Nick Saban at Alabama, where he will have a returning roster loaded with Sunday talent, facilities and resources that most coaches could only dream about, and arguably the most prominent brand in college athletics. It’s hard to think of any better situations. And yet, it will probably be the hardest job in the sport for at least the next few years.

Why? Because of the staggering expectations.

The Crimson Tide just wrapped up another 12-win season and reached the playoff for the eighth time in the 10 seasons of that format. And somehow, because of the impossibly high bar Saban set, that qualifies as a disappointing season in Tuscaloosa. DeBoer won’t get much if any time to adjust to the rigors of playing in the SEC each week or the recruiting battles against Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Bama’s other peers. He will be expected to deliver, and at Bama, for the better part of the last two decades, “deliver” has meant “win national titles.”

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Imagine if the rest of life worked the way the transfer portal has now given coaches and schools a second chance to land the big recruit fish they missed out on the first time around.

You ask your dream girl to prom, only to watch her go with your high school nemesis instead … and then she spends a week at the beach with you after graduation.

You don’t get the job after nailing all of the interviews, wind up taking a position you’re just OK with at another company … and then the first company calls back six months later and offers you the position you interviewed for but with better benefits.

You get out-bid for the house you (but mostly your wife) really, really wanted … and then the new buyer backs out at the last minute and the seller calls you instead of putting the house back on the market.

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Sometimes the opt outs don’t have a huge effect given the relative strength of the two teams in the bowl game or the matchups on the field. Other times you wind up wondering stuff like “Would Kalen King and Johnny Dixon have fared any better against a razor-sharp Jaxson Dart and his strong receiving corps than Cam Miller and Zion Tracy?” or “Would Manny Diaz have been able to make a few more moves on the chess board to match Lane Kiffin’s offensive creativity than Anthony Poindexter and Terry Smith?”

With the caveat that bowl matchups, even those of the New Year’s Six variety, almost never have both teams at the fullest versions of themselves these days, it was mildly disappointing not to see those matchups, or how Chop Robinson and Olu Fashanu, the Nittany Lions’ two best players in 2023, would have played against just the third quality opponent on the schedule.

But none of those things affected the outcome anywhere close to the same way the issue that had nothing to do with opt outs or coaching changes, the issue that has been the issue for Penn State this season, did in the Nittany Lions’ 38-25 loss to Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl.

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Happy holidays, Penn State fans. May it be a true season of giving for your families and friends.

And your beloved football program.

James Franklin put a bow on another top-20 recruiting class this week, the ninth time he has done so in the 10 recruiting cycles in which he’s led the Nittany Lions per the 247 Sports Composite rankings (and the 10^th time, Penn State finished 21^st). Recruiting is how he made his bones, and whether it’s getting the top players from Pennsylvania in most years or finding some under-the-radar gems in both expected and unexpected recruiting pockets around the country, Franklin has pretty consistently delivered on that front, if not at quite an elite level, and that’s with coordinators coming and going at nearly the speed of the transfer portal itself.

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