Among a slew of comfortable, forgettable wins against schools from Indiana, many Big Ten-era Homecoming games have found their way into Penn State history.

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For those fortunate few who call Happy Valley home, the rhythm of life – whether you like it or not – inevitably attunes to the ebb and flow of the campus calendar. As someone who very intentionally chose to take root in a college town, I love it.  There are two times of the year in particular – Commencement and Homecoming – that cause me to reflect on how my experience differs from most.

In mid-May, as I watch young graduates who’ve come to the end of their four(-ish) years in the Nittany Valley pack up whatever contents of their apartments won’t be left out on the curb and drive off toward whatever’s next, I always think to myself, “I wonder what that’s like.”

You see, many moons ago, I took a course taught by Steve Manuel, who some alums may remember from his teaching, and many football fans will recognize, even if they don’t realize it, from his years’ worth of game day photography, as featured by The Football Letter among others. Steve is a Marine. Smart, no-nonsense guy; good sense of humor, loves Penn State. In class, he told us Happy Valley was “the Good Ship Lollipop,” a fantasy land largely divorced from the harsh realities of the outside world. He drew the contrast to be instructive and always with an air of cynicism, but I also detected (or imagined I did) a hint of affection accompanying it.

It got me thinking. “If you find yourself lucky enough to be a passenger on the Good Ship Lollipop, maybe the savvy move is to just never disembark.” And so here I am, over 20 years later, and happy as a pig in slop.

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While the Penn State defensive coordinator’s ‘line games’ often appear like a jumbled, nonsensical mess, there’s actually a method behind the madness. 

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Defensive statistical accolades roll call (trumpet sounds):

Through the first quarter of the 2023 season, Manny Diaz’s Penn State defense stands tall at No. 1 in total defense.

The Lions also rank No.1 in the FBS in passing yards allowed.

More? OK, more: Penn State is No. 3 nationally in sacks per game, No. 3 in defensive EPA, No. 1 in passing dropback EPA, No. 2 in scoring defense, No. 11 in Red Zone defense, No. 2 in first downs allowed per game, No. 14 in third down conversions per game, No. 5 in opponent time of possession, No. 1 in yards per play allowed…

(pauses for a sip of water)

 …No. 6 in opponent punts per play, No. 15 in tackles for loss per game, No. 8 in third-down conversion percentage, No. 10 in takeaways, No. 4 in rush yards allowed per game, No. 7 in opponent completion percentage.

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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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Despite the insistence of some cantankerous columnists, Penn State hasn’t exactly shied away from facing their former archrival.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: If any of the charming folks who represent the Pitt fanbase online come across this week’s column, it will undoubtedly provoke some comments that they are living “rent free” in my head.

Don’t get it twisted; invited guests don’t have to pay rent.

I grew up with the Penn State-Pitt rivalry and remain steadfast in my nostalgia for intense battles played out in the late November chill. I’m writing this piece because Pittsburgh columnists setting Twitter ablaze with rhetorical Molotov cocktails and Penn Staters responding in kind is all in good fun.

To me, the gridiron animus between two great Pennsylvania universities symbolizes everything good about college football. If I had my druthers, the teams would play every year, ideally at the end of the regular season. Based on many in-person and virtual interactions with many Penn State alumni and fans over many years, I am confident that this puts me in the minority.

As far as I can tell, the number of Penn State fans who remember or care about a time when Pitt-Penn State belonged in the same conversation with Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State-Michigan, or Florida-Florida State dwindles with each passing year. The Nittany Lions are about to begin their fourth decade of membership in the ever-expanding Big Ten, and the prospect of future games against USC or Oregon generates much more excitement than the memory of dormant rivalries from the analog age. Today’s college seniors were born after 9/11. Games involving Tony Dorsett and Dan Marino mean little to them. Much of Nittany Nation has moved on.

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To quote novelist Charles Dickens, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…depending on what side of the number you were on.

Man, it had been a good 6 or 7 minutes since I saw something rile up and divide the always-sensible, level-headed Twitter/X community the way Penn State’s cleverly-designed, spread-covering 4^th quarter TD pop pass from backup Beau Pribula to backup Trey Potts did. Oh boy, you were either BIG mad…

Second time this year James Franklin has run up the score so Penn State covers the spread.. If I'm an opposing player/coach and someone pulls this (fake taking a knee) up 21.. There is going to be a price to pay. Classless! https://t.co/cX6HFH33Ov

— Cʜᴜᴄᴋ ᴅᴏᴜɢʟᴀs ✪ (@ChuckDouglas_) October 1, 2023

Or, um, whatever the opposite of BIG mad is (BIG happy?)…

Me when penn state hit the fake kneel to cover yesterday https://t.co/WJHj8lasa1

— The Franchise (@Kfrancis09) October 1, 2023

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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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It may not be quite what we all expected, but the 4-0 Nittany Lions are winning in an impressive fashion that will serve them well down the line.

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“I run six plays, split veer. It’s like Novocain. Just give it time, it always works.”

– Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, “Remember the Titans”

“There’s no greater feeling than to be able to move a man from Point A to Point B against his will.”

– NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Russ Grimm

“I feel like everybody would prefer to have the one- or two-play drive… But it is a different type of satisfaction when you’re out there, and you’re 10, 12, 15 plays in… because you feel like whatever you could do, they can’t stop it.”

– Penn State offensive guard Saleem Wormley

These are two of my favorite football quotes (even though the latter is from a Pitt alum – nobody’s perfect, after all – and the former is fiction) followed by a key member of the 2023 Nittany Lions summing up how it felt to smother the Iowa Hawkeyes with methodical brute force. Taken together, they form a kind of short story about the first quarter of Penn State’s season.

To the extent some fans worried or grumbled after the Lions took apart West Virginia on national television to open this year’s campaign, it can be traced to the ways in which a dominant 38-15 outing still fell short of expectations rooted in preseason hype. In the eight months that elapsed between Penn State’s Rose Bowl win over Utah and the end of Summer training camp, this year’s team had been built up so much in people’s minds that some folks seemed to be expecting to see the 1994 offense and 1986 defense paired together from the opening snap. When every pass rush didn’t result in a sack and every Nick Singleton carry a 60-yard scamper, there was a palpable sense of, “What gives?”

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For the Penn State offense, it’s starting to feel like 2020 again, boys and girls. And, believe it or not, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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We were promised fireworks – the big, loud, colorful, explode-y sort; the kind your Instagram followers (or Facebook friends if you’re 55) insist on posting every July 4^th for reasons that escape us – but through four weeks our hands are starting to burn from holding sparklers too long.

We were told this would be a thrill ride in a Ferrari – fast, exhilarating, the ultimate six-figure neutralizer of height and physical appearance – and instead we’re stuck in a Ford Fiesta Uber with a driver who won’t stop talking. Yeah, sure, we’re reaching our desired destination but the journey from Point A to Point B  has been several galaxies shy of glamorous thus far.

All off-season, pundits gabbed we’d see the best of Mike Yurcich. You know, deep balls flung all across the yard. Rainbows. Points-a-plenty. Home run carries. Pixie dust. Puppy dogs. Exotic formations that feel like your first kiss. Tempo. Smashmouth spread. Taco Bell at 3:14 a.m., eight drinks deep. And yet, if anybody had the gumption to tug at the third-year PSU OC’s five-o’-clock shadow, it wouldn’t shock us if the guy pulling the offensive levers is really Kirk Ciarrocca in a Scooby Doo “bad guy” mask.

Statistically speaking, the 2023 Penn State offense makes zero sense. Blue and White bizzarro world.

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As in football as in life, the best-laid schemes…something, something, something. Sorry, we never read the poem.

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Not that the Nittany Lions needed to do anything too fancy, but Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich called a pretty methodical, vanilla game – which, I suppose, is a fitting flavor for a White Out.

Tasked with scoring one point (1!) to best the stacked-on-cinderblocks, front-lawn jalopy that is Brian Ferentz’s offensive attack (double entendre), Penn State’s bland recipe for success leaned on its beefy blockers to win at the line of scrimmage, stacked bruising-but-boring drive-sustaining runs, and tossed in an occasional play-action opportunity in the Red Zone to boost QB Drew Allar’s stat line.

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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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