Year 10 of the James Franklin Era at Penn State begins in earnest in slightly under four weeks, and the August leading up to the season opener includes a quality those first nine Augusts were, to various extents, lacking: Optimism.

Think about it for a second. When was the last time Penn State entered a season with this much collective excitement/expectations from fans, media, and, if you squint a little bit, from the team itself?

During Franklin’s first two seasons, 2014 and 2015, the Nittany Lions were most greatly feeling the effects of the Sandusky sanctions. Forget expectations; the hope in those years was that Penn State wouldn’t fall on its face. The 2016 season that wound up as the coming out party for Saquon Barkley and ended in a legendary Rose Bowl shootout, if you remember, started as a summer in which people were willing to give first-year starting QB Trace McSorley and the new OC from Fordham some room to grow, and ugly early losses to Pitt and Michigan did not exactly foretell the fireworks to come.

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The reason quarterback is the most important position on the field is that the best of them provide the best chance to create plays when it looks as though no play is there, to beat a blitz or a stunt or perfect coverage with a pinpoint throw or a timely scramble. Much of the excitement that surrounds Penn State coming out of the spring is that the Nittany Lions appear to have at least one of those playmaking quarterbacks ready to roll this fall.

The rest of the excitement, if not most of it, should be based on the notion that if Drew Allar and/or Beau Pribula aren’t fully ready when the season begins, the guys around them should give them time to get there.

Saturday’s Blue-White Game was the first actual scrimmage format for the Nittany Lions since 2019 but it was also still a Blue-White Game, which means any firm conclusions other than that it was the sport of football and that the players on the field will make up the majority of the players who will take the field in the games that count should be avoided.

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When Patrick Kraft was named the athletic director at Penn State just about a year ago, he inherited one of the nation’s largest and most accomplished collection of teams, led by a football program that has gone a few more years without a natty than most fans would like but still boasts a reputation few can match and backed by one of the officially largest and unofficially most fervent alumni bases in the world. It was an enviable gig, as far as AD gigs go.

Fast forward 12 months and Kraft and his team are trying to crack the same puzzle that is stumping many of his counterparts around the country: How do you leverage passionate fans who are ready to write checks to build an NIL surplus that directly allows you to assemble the teams they root for? And, in Penn State’s case in particular, how do you manage that without tripping the political land mines that are unique to (Usually) Happy Valley?

Look around the Nittany Lions and you can see examples of the public face of NIL everywhere: Nick Singleton’s deal with West Shore Homes. Drew Allar, Kalen King, Olu Fashanu and Abdul Carter driving Teslas. Students eating Roman Bravo Young pizzas. Name, image and likeness helping various brands and putting extra cash in the pockets of the student athletes. Smiles, handshakes, American capitalism at work.

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College football’s best teams stay on top by replacing NFL talent with more NFL talent, by ensuring that the Next Man Up is as good as the Last Man Who Left.

Like so many teams looking to make the next step to that elite level, Penn State is working to develop that sort of dynamic at as many positions as possible, though it might already have it in a relatively surprising part of the field.

After years of fielding solid, if unspectacular, defensive backfields, often playing behind front sevens stacked with guys who would go on to play for paychecks on Sundays, the Nittany Lions have quietly built a secondary that can stand up to any in the nation and are showing no signs that it’s not sustainable.

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If life is like a box of chocolates (you never know what you’re gonna get), then pro days are like a box of donuts (you pretty much know exactly what you’re going to get, but certain varieties are more popular than others).

The range of players working out in Holuba Hall for pro scouts each year extends from guys who will be on the stage at the NFL Draft to those who haven’t played in a few seasons but are there to take one last swing at a professional future. It is the players in the middle who are often the most compelling, the chocolate glazed who won’t get picked until the cream-filled and jelly donuts are gone but just might be a good fit for the right squad.

Players like … Sean Clifford.

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The second-hardest thing to do in basketball is to complete a huge, momentum-shifting run to erase a big deficit and take a lead late in a game against a team that is by all rights better than you.

The hardest thing to do is hold onto that lead.

Penn State pulled off the first feat Saturday in Des Moines, using a 10-0 spurt to finally push ahead of a tough Texas team it had trailed for most of the evening, then went into a stall as the second-seeded Longhorns re-established command and ended the Nittany Lions’ memorable run with a 71-66 win in the NCAA Tournament’s Round of 32.

After a cold offensive first half, the Nittany Lions began to see some shots fall in the second, but still trailed 55-48 with just over seven minutes to play when Myles Dread sunk a 3-pointer and was fouled. He missed the free throw but nailed another three less than a minute later to make it a one-point game. Cam Wynter gave Penn State its first lead of the half with a pair of free throws at the 5:12 mark, and Seth Lundy converted a turnover into a fast-break layup that made it 58-55 Penn State with 4:50 to play.

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Two Penn State football developments this past week indicated two levels of risk. Both hinted very strongly that James Franklin feels pretty good about where his program is.

The announcement of former defensive end and defensive assistant Deion Barnes as the team’s new defensive line coach was a popular one among much of the fan base and, as a short video released by the team showed, even more popular with the players. And it’s not hard to see why. Barnes possesses just about every quality you would like to see in a young coach: He’s played the game at a high level, earning Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors in 2012, has a knack for teaching it, has recruiting ties in a relatively key region, and has the sort of grinder mentality one needs to survive the ultracompetitive world of college football.

He’s missing one quality, though: This is his first big-boy coaching job.

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Part of what made Penn State’s run to the championship final of the Big Ten Tournament remarkable was the knowledge that the Nittany Lions hadn’t even played their best basketball in wins over Illinois, Northwestern and Indiana (and very nearly Purdue). They were very much gritty, and not pretty, and though there was something meaningful in that, those who had closely watched Penn State the entire season knew the Lions had more to give.

They showed that and then some in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

Penn State utterly dominated a very good SEC team Thursday in both halves of a 76-59 win in Des Moines to pick up its first win in college basketball’s big tournament in more than 8,000 days. If that sounds like a long time, it probably was only slightly longer than what the 40 minutes must have felt like to the Aggies, who were little more than bystanders as Andrew Funk rained threes, Jalen Pickett, um, picked their defense apart, and the rest of the Nittany Lions filled their various roles expertly.

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Penn State’s Little Engine That Could ran into a tank on Sunday in the form of Purdue big man Zach Edey.

And then the Nittany Lions called an Uber and nearly got to their destination anyway before falling 67-65 to the Boilermakers in the Big Ten championship game.

On paper, the final result made sense considering that Purdue had been the best team in the conference the entire season and also considering that the best center in the country, while a difficult matchup for any college team, was an essentially impossible matchup for a team that plays a good chunk of its minutes without a true big on the floor.

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“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

 -Thomas Carlyle, 19^th-century Scottish philosopher

The past is a wasteland. The future is uncertain and a lot more ominous than it was a few weeks ago.

The Penn State men’s basketball present, however, is something to be savored.

The Nittany Lions, essentially left for dead after blowing a huge second-half lead in an eventual loss to Rutgers on Feb. 26, are firmly in the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2011 and will play Purdue on Sunday for the Big Ten Tournament title. That’s awesome in and of itself but what’s even better is that very few teams in the country are playing better ball (at least for stretches) than the Nittany Lions are at the moment.

What we’re seeing is a run like few Penn State teams have ever experienced, and Nittany Lion fans should soak it up for all it’s worth, for a few reasons.

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