Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023-24 Sunday Column 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.

5 + 7 = 14.

No, this isn’t the new math your kids are learning in schools, but it’s how math works in college football these days. Before the digital ink dried on the CFP press release announcing the new “5+7” 12-team format (five highest-ranked conference champs plus seven at-large berths) that model became instantly antiquated as word leaked that discussions on how to shift it to a 14-team field by as early as 2026 were already underway.

More teams, of course, playing for the biggest trophy at the end of the season means more money for a sport that is already Scrooge McDucking it, but it also means more opportunities for more teams. At least in theory.

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We all want to hold on to at least a bit of the past, if only because we tend to remember the good times a touch more fondly than maybe they actually deserved. James Franklin took on a somewhat wistful tone this week when, speaking in the context of the transfer portal and NIL, he said, “The reality is the college football that we’ve all known, the college athletics that we’ve all known, that’s not coming back.”

And then there is Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano, who decided this week, with a few others, to bring a controversial chunk of the football program’s past back into the present and future by presenting a resolution to name the Beaver Stadium playing surface for longtime head coach Joe Paterno to the rest of the university’s trustees.

Let me get two important disclaimers out of the way here. First, I have no desire to weigh in on whether Paterno deserves such a posthumous honor, on how his legacy or his family have been treated by the university (now on its third president and third athletic director since he died in 2012), and certainly not on how much culpability he should be assigned for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes or how Penn State handled them. The second is that I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that the stadium turf will bear his name in the near future, barring a nine-figure donation being attached to it, of course.

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For new Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, the “why” behind his prevalent use of RPOs – the three-letter cornerstone of modern football that’s often treated like a repulsive four-letter word while keyboard thumpers melt on message boards – is best explained through a childhood toy for nerds.

It’s called a Hoberman Sphere. If your parents never bought you one, congratulations.

Invented before fun, the Hoberman Sphere is a colorful, plastic, finger-pinching geodesic dome capable of massive contraction/expansion that can be either symmetrical or irregular depending on which jagged joints are pushed and/or pulled. If you got suckered into chaperoning school field trips to any Science Center or Children’s Museum in the past 30 or so years, you’ve likely seen stacks of them in the gift shop go untouched.

So what the heck does this have to do with Kotelnicki’s catalog of RPOs?

Glad you asked, lazy transition device.

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Friday’s announcement of the Big Ten and SEC joining forces for an “advisory group” didn’t sound like so much of a declaration of all-out war against the NCAA as a mere reminder of the massive amount of firepower those conferences wield in the grand scheme of college athletics and college football in particular.

Commissioners Tony Petitti (pictured above next to NCAA president/frenemy Charlie Baker at a Senate Judiciary Hearing) and Greg Sankey used carefully parsed language in the press release, which also included phrases like “address the significant challenges facing college athletics and opportunities for the betterment of the student-athlete experience” and the group “will engage with other constituencies as necessary.”

Loosely translated, the 259-word release said, “Figure your stuff out, NCAA, or we’ll figure it out ourselves.”

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Admit it, Penn State fans — part of you will miss Jim Harbaugh.

Perhaps no other modern coach, at any level of any sport, is as histrionic along the gameday sideline or as unabashedly corny/arrogant with the media. It’s awful to watch your team lose to his, and see the smirks and fist pumps that are the spoils of victory, but it makes it that much sweeter when your team beats his and you can see the scowl and misery on his face.

The other parts of you, and the rest of the Big Ten, won’t miss the former Michigan coach, who led his team to a natty this season when he wasn’t serving suspensions for recruiting violations … and sign-stealing and is now back in the NFL with the Chargers. Harbaugh’s departure is only one of several big changes to the Big Ten in 2024, but many of those changes could be taken advantage of by James Franklin’s Nittany Lions.

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The “alignment” between the Penn State football program and the athletic and university administrations James Franklin has so often talked about during the past couple of years, it would seem, is yielding some tangible results.

Reporting this week by Ben Jones at StateCollege.com showed that the Nittany Lions’ recruiting budget more than doubled over the past year, up to $2.8 million, a figure that would put a program that has perennially finished in the nation’s top 15 in recruiting rankings most years under Franklin among the five best in the nation in recruiting spending, which entails many things but was defined by the fiscal year report as costs of transportation, lodging and meals for recruits, costs of transportation for staff (including private aircraft), plus phone charges, postage, “and such.”

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Kalen DeBoer just reached the college football coaching summit.

After leading Washington to the national championship game, DeBoer will succeed Nick Saban at Alabama, where he will have a returning roster loaded with Sunday talent, facilities and resources that most coaches could only dream about, and arguably the most prominent brand in college athletics. It’s hard to think of any better situations. And yet, it will probably be the hardest job in the sport for at least the next few years.

Why? Because of the staggering expectations.

The Crimson Tide just wrapped up another 12-win season and reached the playoff for the eighth time in the 10 seasons of that format. And somehow, because of the impossibly high bar Saban set, that qualifies as a disappointing season in Tuscaloosa. DeBoer won’t get much if any time to adjust to the rigors of playing in the SEC each week or the recruiting battles against Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Bama’s other peers. He will be expected to deliver, and at Bama, for the better part of the last two decades, “deliver” has meant “win national titles.”

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Imagine if the rest of life worked the way the transfer portal has now given coaches and schools a second chance to land the big recruit fish they missed out on the first time around.

You ask your dream girl to prom, only to watch her go with your high school nemesis instead … and then she spends a week at the beach with you after graduation.

You don’t get the job after nailing all of the interviews, wind up taking a position you’re just OK with at another company … and then the first company calls back six months later and offers you the position you interviewed for but with better benefits.

You get out-bid for the house you (but mostly your wife) really, really wanted … and then the new buyer backs out at the last minute and the seller calls you instead of putting the house back on the market.

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The NFL Combine is where the (apologies to Rick James) superfreak athletes of college football separate themselves from the mere everyday freaks, where (apologies to Eric Roberts) the best of the best can go from a fringe first-rounder to a top-10 pick, from a fringe draftee to a second-day selection, and earn themselves a good deal of money in the process.

Penn State has had its fair share of superfreak performances at the combine over the years, from Parsons to Barkley to… Apke and from dozens of other players who may not have made the same type of headlines but, whether it was with an impressive jump or a surprising 40 time, improved their stock during the week.

It’s been a different story for the seven Nittany Lions at this year’s combine. None of them would have qualified as true athletic freaks going in, and they largely did very little to change that with their respective performances.

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This 4-man blitz popularized by current Baylor HC Dave Aranda roughly a decade ago is probably the ‘safest’ pressure package in Manny Diaz’s Balls-to-the-Wall defensive binder.

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On Dec. 17, 2021, new Penn State defensive coordinator Manny Diaz – still very much a stranger in a strange place on that date – “met” with the local media for the first time over Zoom.

After a series of clunky, repetitive, and unnecessary pleasantries from every reporter asking a question from their bedroom/home office, multiple inquires seeking more details on how Miami did him dirty, and even some prodding into his ‘Grand Opening, Grand Closing’ 18-day tenure as Temple’s head coach in 2018, we finally got to the good stuff: What’s a Manny Diaz defense all about?

“Philosophically, (former Penn State DC) Bob (Shoop) and I are very closely aligned in the way that we like to be aggressive, attack-pressure defenses,” Diaz said that day.

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