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.

Continue reading

Sponsor: FTB’s Donors Club – the most direct way to support our efforts – is back for another year! (Sally Struthers voice) For $9.99 you can feed a starving blogger and get a cool FTB Koozie in return. JOIN HERE.

*Please remember to click the ‘Share My Address With For The Blogy’ box when checking out so we know where to mail your gift!

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.

Continue reading

SPONSOR: Is this Heaven? Far from it…it’s Des Moines, Iowa. Regardless, STUBHUB has your tickets for Penn State’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in a dozen years. Find your seat HERE, using FTB’s STUBHUB LINK. 

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.

Continue reading

“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.

Continue reading

I didn’t see an All-American the first time I saw Jalen Pickett play.

It was one of the earlier games of the 2021-22 season, a sleepy November weeknight affair against a winless St. Francis Brooklyn squad. Pickett was 1-of-7 from the field and finished with four points, one board and three assists in 32 minutes. But it wasn’t the skimpy stat line that bothered me. It was his slow, deliberate approach; a lot of dribbles without a lot of movement toward the basket. I figured he was another small-conference transfer who was going to have trouble adjusting to the speed and length of Big Ten defenses.

A year and a half later, that same player is the hottest, arguably most unguardable player (not named Zach Edey) in the conference, and he’s dragging a team without a lot of other reliable options on offense and a less-than-lockdown defense toward an NCAA Tournament berth.

Continue reading

Micah Shrewsberry has done a lot of good stuff since he took over as the Penn State men’s basketball coach last year. He’s completed a couple of solid-to-strong recruiting classes, used the transfer portal to fill in some significant gaps left by departures that were no fault of his own, and, if you’re watching closely, has shown a grasp of Xs and Os that exceeds that of most of his Nittany Lion coaching predecessors.

However, he seems to have fallen into the trap that ensnared many of those predecessors and a sizable chunk of Penn State’s not-so-sizable men’s hoops fan base—namely, he thinks Big Ten officials are out to get him and his team.

To which I would say:

1. No they’re not.
2. If they are, the coach and his team need to try a few other tactics

The Nittany Lions’ mid-winter nose dive continued Saturday with a 74-68 loss at Maryland, their fourth straight defeat and fifth in the last six games. And a couple of quick looks at the final box underscore what have been two sticking points for Shrewsberry for the bulk of the season. The Terrapins shot 23 free throws to Penn State’s four. And Jalen Pickett, the do-it-all senior guard who spends more time with the ball in his hands than any other Nittany Lion, went to the free-throw line once, bringing his total free-throw attempts over the four-game losing streak to … one.

Continue reading

It’s the time of year when many first-year college basketball players hit the freshman wall, that real or imagined phenomenon that is characterized by tired legs, questionable decision-making, and generally a lesser quality of play than the same player showed from November through mid-January.

Penn State’s freshmen haven’t logged nearly enough minutes to hit that freshman wall, which is good for them but not great for the present or future of the program.

The Nittany Lions, 13-7 overall and 4-5 in conference play entering Sunday’s game against Michigan, are very much in the NCAA Tournament mix thanks to one of the most experienced lineups in the entire nation, let alone the Big Ten. Jalen Pickett, Seth Lundy, Myles Dread, Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter have already played in a combined 633 games, and their bodies and their minds have gone through so many reps that any one of them would not be out of place as a fourth assistant coach.

Continue reading

Micah Shrewsberry, in the parlance of our times, has got that dawg in him.

The, um, underdawg, that is.

“I’m one of the ultimate underdog kind of guys,” the Nittany Lions’ basketball coach told The Athletic’s Brian Hamilton last spring. “Toughness will make up for it. We may not be as big as other people. Just be tougher than them.”

This quote, occurring more in the postseason of Shrewsberry’s first year at Penn State than the preseason of his second, was more than prophetic about the current rendition of the Nittany Lions. The roster, as he noted, does not have a lot of size, and Shrewsberry has arguably made it even smaller by eschewing the center position altogether for large stretches of the game. Six-foot-4 senior wing Myles Dread, not unaccustomed to guarding fours at various points of his career, is often seen playing man defense on fives, including Purdue’s behemoth center Zach Edey.

Continue reading