The nothingburger of the week was made from James Franklin’s comments on the way an unnamed conference opponent (rhymes with “Witch again”) schedules, er, less than staunch non-conference opponents. A few media outlets twisted the remarks to make it seem as though the Penn State coach was taking a shot at, um, the Jewel Vereens, when in fact Franklin was actually complimenting the program for a strategy he has used consistently since he arrived nine years ago.

Which brings us to Saturday’s game against the fighting Minutemen of Massachusetts, who put up about the resistance most expected (almost none) in a 63-0 loss to the Nittany Lions. When Penn State put this game on the schedule in January 2019, UMass had been an FBS program for only five seasons and had won a total of 16 games in that time period. Since that time, the Minutemen are 4-44, including Saturday’s loss.

In a brief and half-hearted defense of Franklin, and the coach he wasn’t taking a shot at, and basically the heads of all Power 5 programs, I get it. There is no point in going out of your way to schedule difficult non-conference games if A) Everyone else is doing it and B) Your conference schedule has the juice to get you to a playoff on its own.

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Stats are fun. Stats of both the basic and advanced varieties can, if interpreted the right way, tell you a lot about a team. The ways that most sports are played and coached today are as influenced by statistics as they’ve ever been, and that includes football, perhaps the last bastion of the old-school, “go with your gut” mindset that sounds cool but doesn’t really mean anything unless you win the game.

A lack of stats can also be very telling … but not always in obvious ways.

Take the Big Ten defensive statistics, for example. The list of the top 25 leading tacklers does not include a single Penn State player, nor do the lists of leaders in passes defended or interceptions. No Nittany Lion has more than 2.5 sacks, and only Zane Durant (4.5) and Adisa Isaac (4.0) are among the top 25 in the conference in tackles for loss. In fact, Penn State’s leading tackler through five games, Curtis Jacobs, has 11 fewer stops than the 25^th player on the conference tackles list, Michigan State’s Dillon Tatum, and 44 fewer than the Big Ten leader, Iowa’s Jay Higgins.

Why? Penn State’s defense simply doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field these days.

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As Penn State piled up points and yards against outmatched opposition during a 4-0 start, pundits and grumpy fans who needed to pick nits pointed to the lack of explosive plays from the offense, which didn’t get the Nittany Lions in much trouble against the soft early part of the schedule but did not seem to bode well for the tougher sledding ahead. At the time, especially given those insane victory margins, they seemed just that: nits to pick.

The Lions’ slow-start win at Northwestern, however, revealed the dirty little secret they’d done a pretty good job of keeping through the first month of the season:

This team is going to struggle to generate explosive offensive plays because it doesn’t have explosive playmakers.

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Was Penn State playing a little possum in the first three weeks of the season? Did it decide sometime this week or even this summer that it was going to beat Iowa in pitch-perfect Kirk Ferentz fashion? Does Drew Allar owe Jalen Hurts usage rights fees for the Tush Push?

These are the things we found ourselves pondering late in the rarest of rarities, a 31-0 Penn State blowout/shutout of perennial nemesis Iowa. In what looked like the perfect conditions for a classic Hawkeye Cro-Magnon rock fight, in which the punters are the best and most active players on the field and modern offense is rendered moot, James Franklin’s team started slowly but steadily, took reasonable control of the game in the first half and then blew it open after halftime, doing so with a running game that continued to wear down a very good Iowa defense, a diverse passing attack that utilized the tight end in very much the same way Iowa has haunted Penn State defenses over the years, and a defense that made a Brian Ferentz offense look even more feeble than usual, if such a thing is actually possible.

Whew.

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There are a couple of ways to view Penn State’s 30-13 defeat of Illinois:

1. The Nittany Lions have, both gradually and suddenly, evolved into an Ohio State-Georgia-Michigan-What-Bama-Used-to-Be type of program, the sort that has enough talent and depth that it needs only to hold serve for the first half or even the first three quarters before inferior opponents, even those who have been playing smart and tough football, inevitably succumb to that talent.
2. Penn State has some major issues to sort out and was fortunate that the Illinois offense insisted on giving away the football.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, the contrast between this game and the last time the two teams met, that nine-overtime clusterbleep of a game in 2021, was stark. The talent gap between these teams, quite narrow two years ago, has widened considerably even when you consider the best player on the field was Illini defensive tackle Jer’Zhan Newton. The Nittany Lions totaled 383 yards of offense, which was 153 more than they mustered against this opponent two years ago. They were turnover-free for the third straight week while Illinois, was, um, slightly less protective of the football.

And yet, there were still moments where you wondered exactly how far Penn State has come: The offense’s first three drives, two of which began in plus territory thanks to the ballhawking defense, netted only six points. There was a 2^nd and 2 in the third quarter that became a punt. The wunderkind, Drew Allar, who had been borderline surgical through the first two weeks, did not look like the moment was too big for him but neither was he anywhere close to sharp, throwing behind or just out of the reach of several receivers, who didn’t help by dropping some imperfect but wholly catchable balls. His offensive line, which had been competent if not dominant in two games at home, struggled to get much push for its running backs and committed a few costly penalties, casting a longer and darker shadow over the idea that this would be the year the big fellas finally put it all together.

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Guarantee games are the worrrrrrrst.

But, everyone plays them, and until no one plays them, everyone will continue to play them. College football coaches take no prisoners and spare no expense to get a chance at a playoff berth/shot at a natty, and if that means putting a win on the schedule that barely qualifies as such, kinda like Penn State’s 63-7 pasting of FCS Delaware, consider it done.

While these games have seemingly little value for folks other than the true football sickos (hi, guys), 6-year-olds who are learning the game or the families of the third-teamers who actually get to see their sons play, they can be mildly instructive when it comes to A) gauging the overall health of the program by the respective quality levels of its depth chart and B) seeing how fundamentally prepared/mentally disciplined each of those levels are between the whistles.

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There was a lot of Week 1 stuff on Saturday night in Beaver Stadium. Missed tackles. Confusion on blocking assignments. Burned timeouts in the middle of both halves. We won’t talk about the field goal kicking.

But there was also a lot of stuff that you could see — and, if you’re a Penn State fan, desperately hope to see — holding up in October and November. And while the Nittany Lions’ season-opening 38-15 win over a game but outmatched West Virginia team won’t turn many heads around the country away from, uh, Deion Sanders postgame interviews, it can be a pretty damn encouraging night if you view it as pretext for the season at large.

Some of the stuff we thought we knew — Nicky and the Fatman would again be awesome, Manny Diaz would bring pressure, Mike Yurcich would draw up some fun stuff — turned out to be true, but some of the stuff we thought we knew — Whither Chop Robinson? Was the offensive line really any better? Is linebacker truly a strength on this defense? — will perhaps require further examination at later dates.

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Q: Why is Drew Allar like a farmer?

A: He’s been throwin’ seeds all spring and summer!

As Penn State’s 2023 football season mercifully approaches, all eyes are on the Nittany Lions’ rocket-laser-armed quarterback. His teammates have raved about his abilities. Longtime Associated Press beat guy Ralph Russo wondered if he isn’t the most important player in the country. His grrrrreatness is validated by none other than Tony the Tiger!

What’s more, the addition of Allar to the starting lineup (OK, so he hasn’t technically been named the starter…yet) also means offensive coordinator/mad scientist Mike Yurcich finally has a player who will force defenses to cover just about every part of the field. Thought Penn State had a dynamic offense with (current Packers QB2!!) Sean Clifford? Wait’ll they get a load of these guys when Allar is ripping the ball 30, 40, 50 yards downfield.

Here’s the thing, though. Arm talent is a great, great thing for a quarterback to have. And Allar’s size (6-foot-5 with some added bulk and strength) enables him to see the field and provide a stable platform for that aforementioned rocket laser arm. But if arm talent and size were all it took, Anthony Morelli and Christian Hackenberg would have achieved far more at Penn State than Michael Robinson and Trace McSorley. Allar is going to make a bunch of plays that few other quarterbacks can make this season. But it is the plays that a lot more guys have the ability make—but often don’t—that he’ll have to make consistently if Penn State is going to have the type of season that matches his talent.

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There are only two things, if you believe the word on the street, that stand to prevent a Nittany Lion offense that appears to be stacked from threatening to blow up the scoreboard this autumn:

1. Drew Allar needs some time to become the real deal (quite possible) OR he isn’t the real deal (shut yo’ mouf!!)
2. Allar is money but his wide receiving corps isn’t up to snuff OR they don’t provide him enough support to, um, be money

Maybe KeAndre Lambert-Smith is ready to make the jump from ‘Occasionally Explosive’ to ‘Consistently The Man.’ Maybe Tre Wallace is going to step up and be the solid No. 2 that this offense sorely needs. Maybe Dante Cephas will be able to produce at the Big Ten level the way he did in the MAC for Kent State. Or maybe someone will emerge from the grab bag containing Omari Evans, Malick Meiga, Liam Clifford, Kaden Saunders, Malik McClain, Anthony Ivey, Cristian Driver, Tyler Johnson (this meeting room is standing-room only) and be a modified Cinderella story not unlike Jordan Norwood and Deon Butler exploding onto the scene from relative obscurity in 2005.

Or, just maybe, the group as a whole will underwhelm, to the extent that a Parker Washington-Mitchell Tinsley-led unit did for much of 2022 or, perhaps, even worse.

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I find myself against the continued addition of schools to the Big Ten for reasons both mathematical — how many programs can you cram into a conference before you remove the “Ten” from its name? Twenty? Forty? — and practical — having women’s volleyball or men’s soccer teams bussing or flying to all parts of the country during the week is no good for athletic budgets, athlete well-being, or in-person fan experience.

When it comes to football expansion, however, I say bring it on.

Take a look at Penn State’s 2023 schedule. Whether you’re bearish (you see three or four losses), bullish (you see one or two losses), or super-bullish (no losses and no margins of victory less than 20 points), there are a handful of games you know are simply not going to be competitive, even accounting for the annual noon kick/looking ahead/hurricane remnant games in which Penn State forgets to show up for the first half and winds up winning by 10 instead of 28.

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