Somewhere, Joe Paterno and Bo Schembechler were watching and smiling (somewhere in the more earthly realm, Jim Harbaugh was watching, too, but probably not smiling). The BIG NOON matchup between Penn State and fellow top 10 team Michigan was a classic throwback. Your run game vs. my defense. My run game vs. your defense. Pass? Are you nuts? This isn’t a basketball game.

For three quarters and change, James Franklin had decided to take the ball out of his sophomore quarterback’s hands (his feet were another story) and try to beat the Wolverines in the old-school way. And for three quarters and change, his defense and his run game were at least giving the Nittany Lions a chance to do that, and in the process steal that desperately sought win over one of the league’s two bullies.

There were two problems with this plan, though, and both of them proved fatal in the guts of the game. The first was that Michigan is, well, built for this, both in terms of physical construction and philosophy. Penn State is built for … well, we’re still not sure, and that’s a problem that transcended this game. The second was that Michigan held the lead, held the high ground, and that enabled the Wolverines, even with one of the nation’s most efficient quarterbacks at their disposal, to call 33(!!) consecutive run plays on offense and, on defense, force Penn State to try this wild and crazy strategy of throwing the football and catching it.

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Take a quick look at Big Ten scores from Saturday, Penn State fans. Indiana beat Wisconsin. Michigan State beat Nebraska. Illinois topped Minnesota.

If you’re one of those dyed-in the-wool Nittany Lion fans who are predicting a 10-2 finish for this team and have been ever since the loss in Columbus and maybe even before that, and you’re bitter about Penn State not being able to win the games that really matter even if they flex their collective muscle in those other 10 games (see Saturday’s 51-15 pasting of Maryland), well, there isn’t much I can say here that will change your mind.

But it probably needs to be said, before Penn State plays the other of its two season-deciding games a week from now in Beaver Stadium, that what the Nittany Lions do in those “other” Big Ten games matters, both now and certainly moving forward.

The Nittany Lions are still not in the top class of the conference, where the Buckeyes continue to grind out wins and the Wolverines, while enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous cheating accusations, continue to just grind teams to pulp. But they are in a class by themselves just below that class and above the rest of the conference, where it’s a lot of closely contested if not brilliantly played football most weeks, where a game like Iowa’s 10-7 win over Northwestern is not nearly the outlier it should be.

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You would be hard-pressed to find better symbolism than KeAndre Lambert-Smith’s tightrope tap dance down the sideline late in Saturday’s 9-point Penn State defeat of Indiana in Beaver Stadium. Yes, the Lions’ top receiver reached the end zone for the decisive score after hauling in a rainbow from his young quarterback (more on that in a minute), but, on that play as in the rest of the afternoon, Penn State was walking a very thin line as it needed nearly 59 minutes to put away the Big Ten’s least threatening team.

In one sense, that wasn’t all that much of a surprise given how mentally flattening the Lions’ last game had been and the decided decline in quality of opponent. In another, more important sense, it was even less of a surprise given the state we saw the offense in last week. Unfortunately for Penn State, it was much of the same for much of the game this week.

The Nittany Lions’ first six possessions resulted in four punts, a missed field-goal attempt, and one touchdown. That’s the sort of production (as we saw last week) that is not going to get it done against the country’s top defenses, but this time it was against an Indiana unit that had entered the game allowing more points and yards against conference opposition than any Big Ten defense. Penn State did recover to score 17 points on its next three possessions, sandwiching two sustained touchdown drives around halftime and a field goal set up by a Jaylen Reed interception, but even that two-minute drill was unsatisfying, capped by a (correct) intentional grounding call against Drew Allar. Then came two more punts and Allar’s first pick of the season, which set up a game-tying field goal by Indiana and quickly turned the day from “classic sloppy hangover noon kick win” to “OMG is this actually going to be a loss … to Tom Allen?”

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The final drive was the hardest to watch.

You could argue that any of the previous six second-half possessions by what passed for Penn State’s offense Saturday, which added up to — trigger warning — 36 yards in 25 plays, would have been the toughest to watch, as they collectively built on a string of ineptitude previously not seen from the 2023 team, and, really, not even any offense in the James Franklin Era, with the possible exception of the time Christian Hackenberg was sacked approximately 316 times in the loss at Temple in 2015.

But the final, pre-onside kick drive, when Drew Allar actually connected with a few receivers for decent gains, including the dart to Kaden Saunders on a broken play for the Lions’ only touchdown of the day, was more painful still, because it reminded you that Penn State wasn’t completely bereft of talent, as all of its other offensive possessions that day had so strongly suggested. It reminded you that Allar had, in fact, completed passes before and is likely to do so again, that his linemen provided him with some time to do so and his receivers were physically capable of hauling those passes in.

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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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