Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023 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.

Welp, the highly-anticipated season finale and last unchecked NY6 bowl win “box” on Penn State’s program checklist was a tough watch. No way around it. Season-long themes remained true: out of sync, stagnancy that produced little to no explosive offense. It’s also worth noting that PSU was missing some of their top players.  Negatives aside, let’s take a look at one of, if not the only, exciting offensive play of the afternoon.

Fun.

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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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The Peach Bowl features two major conference foes with many similarities, including a desire to validate a 10-win season that left many critics unimpressed.

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023 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.

We began this series of columns back in September by talking about the journey of a college football season as a story told in weekly installments. As we come to the end of this year’s journey, the Nittany Lions will conclude their 2023 campaign by facing an opponent that followed a strikingly similar path with many comparable story beats.

Penn State and Ole Miss fielded excellent squads that spent portions of the season ranked in the top 10, dominated the weaker foes on their schedules, faced questions about whether their ace-recruiter head coaches could win big games, and ultimately frustrated their fans with losses to their two marquee conference opponents. In the case of each school, one side of the ball carried the load; offense for the Rebels and defense for PSU. Now these teams arrive in Atlanta seeking to validate 10-win seasons that left critics questioning how good they really are. Each will play without their top edge rusher, but otherwise managed to staunch the bowl opt-out bleeding.

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As 2024 rapidly approaches, what Penn State fans are looking forward to the most isn’t the Peach Bowl or even what Andy Kotelnicki might be able to do with the offense next season.

It’s that the college football playoff will be expanding next season, and for a program that has found itself in the top 12 in five of the last eight years but never in the four-team playoff, that is a change that can’t come quickly enough. The larger field will provide opportunities for a new kind of relevancy for several teams, and if recent form holds and the transfer portal is abundant, the Nittany Lions stand a very good chance of being one of them.

But if Penn State isn’t able to address the reasons it hasn’t yet cracked that top four under James Franklin, it’s hard to imagine any potential playoff game wouldn’t deliver the same nauseating feeling that has been brought on by its failures in marquee matchups.

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It’s hard to name more than a few Penn State players or coaches who have had better two-year runs than the departing Manny Diaz, who switched his job title from Nittany Lion defensive coordinator to Duke head coach this week.

Bill O’Brien comes to mind. Saquon Barkley (yes, he was here for three years but his 2016 and 2017 seasons were a considerable step up from his 2015 debut). Joe Moorhead, who directed the offenses in which Barkley flourished. Ki-Jana Carter in 1993-94.

The point is, it was a short but brilliant body of work, and it now leaves James Franklin in the familiar space of equal parts disappointment and opportunity. The odds aren’t great that Penn State will find someone better than Diaz for its next DC. But the same conditions that helped Diaz lead the Nittany Lions to some historic defensive numbers will at least make that possible.

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Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023 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.

“You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. – Maya Angelou.”

 –James Franklin, possibly*

Starting tomorrow until some random late May 2024 afternoon when those antiquated college football preview magazines hit the shelves at what’s left of Barnes & Noble Booksellers (just a stack of Star Trek Funko Pops and a scattering of road atlases last time I checked), we’ll be Quasimodo-ing it in our depressing 1-bedroom  apartments, sifting through film after film after film and marveling over the magnificent schematic sandcastles new Penn State OC Andy Kotelnicki molded during his days at Kansas and Buffalo.

But, for now, let’s take one last glimpse at the moist, amorphous pile of washed-away dirt left on the shoreline that was the 2023 Penn State offense…if, for no other reason, to identify which specific offensive concepts Kotelnicki needs to lug his shovel and pale to and patch up first.

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James Franklin got his guy. He’d had his eye on this Big 12 offensive coordinator for quite some time and had admired his work at multiple programs. Penn State’s head coach had decided his own offense needed a change, and this coach, Franklin decided, had the experience directing potent, explosive offenses that would translate to helping shove the Nittany Lions over that steep, elusive mountain peak separating good from great. The hire was widely praised and another example of Franklin’s enduring ability to recruit not only top players but sought-after coaches as well.

That guy, of course, was Mike Yurcich.

Three years later, Franklin made another change, and the Big 12 OC this time around is Andy Kotelnicki, from Kansas by way of Buffalo and the University of Mary, which is a real school in Division II. Once again, the credentials are impressive. Once again, the stakes are high, and once again, there is moldable talent in the barn, even if it appears the offensive line is headed for yet another rebuild.

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Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023 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.

Best for last, right? Penn State’s regular-season finale included explosive runs, explosive passes, and jussssst enough competency on offense for the fanbase rightly laud the substitute-teaching job conducted by Co-OC’s Ja’Juan Seider and Ty Howle. Heck, a few brazen message board warriors pounded their dust/crumb infested keyboards asking for Penn State head coach James Franklin to consider an internal promotion of Seider or Howle (or both…because we still aren’t sure who was actually calling the plays).

Not to be all Debbie Downer, but for what it’s worth, every concept PSU ran this past Saturday Friday had been called dozens of times during the  mostly-forgettable Mike Yurcich era.

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Sometimes marketing slogans wind up being just a bit too on the nose.

For the last few years, we’ve been told, if only by promotional materials, that Penn State was “unrivaled” but it was only during the 2023 season, perhaps, that this was actually true.

The Nittany Lions, you see, spent essentially the entire season playing only against themselves. In the 10 wins, including Friday’s ho-hum, 42-0 defeat of a tired-looking group of Michigan State Spartans in Detroit, they were almost always in command, thanks to an incredible defense and an overall talent advantage on offense that mitigated most of their discombobulation on that side of the ball. They were trying to win the game, but because those games were essentially in hand before they even started, they were really trying to reach a standard that they never quite found.

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For the second time since joining the Big Ten, Penn State will see its manufactured rivalry with Michigan State interrupted by conference expansion.

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For longtime fans who remember Penn State football’s roots as an Eastern independent, the program’s place in the Big Ten has always felt a little awkward. But 2023 marked the Nittany Lions’ 30^th season of conference competition, meaning full generations of Lions loyalists have grown up knowing nothing but B1G membership for their beloved Blue and White. For most of that time, fans young and old could count on two things at season’s end: Michigan State and freezing cold. Starting last season and looking ahead, however, while the weather will be lousy as ever, the opponent will be different. Penn State’s annual season-ending matchup with the Spartans, which was conceived out of the evolving conference landscape, has now become a victim of it.

Yet through most of State’s years in the Big Ten, Sparty loomed as the final obstacle to overcome, a gatekeeper guarding the path toward regular season glory, bowl position, and occasionally, a conference championship. In spite of this seemingly prime position on each’s year slate, the series never managed to generate much enmity on either side. Over nearly three decades, fans of both teams certainly grew accustomed to seeing one another at season’s end, but this familiarity never bred much in the way of contempt. Other opponents, notably Michigan and Ohio State, generated more publicity and hate, and neither teams’ players nor their fans ever circled late November on the calendar. Bona fide rivalries in college football are funny things, and if 22 (soon to be 23) season finales between Michigan State and Penn State can teach us anything, it’s that they cannot be engineered.

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