Sometimes college football games — especially the season-openers — can feel as if they’re taking forever. In some cases, when you get a two-hour weather delay, that feeling is multiplied by a hundred.

In their much-anticipated debut under the crafty guidance of Andy Kotelnicki in Saturday’s game at West Virginia, and in the midst of a five-hour and 45-minute affair that checked both of the boxes above, Drew Allar and the Penn State offense needed only a handful of plays that lasted a handful of seconds to dispatch a fired-up group of Mountaineers and their, um, endearing fan base, and in the process feed Lion fans watching there and at home with some needed optimism.

On paper, the 2024 offense isn’t much different than the 2023 version; if anything, it’s worse. The offensive line is rebuilding, the group of reliable receiving options appears to be entirely composed of Tre Wallace, the dynamic tight end due of Theo Johnson and Tyler Warren is now just Warren, and Drew Allar and Beau Pribula are still doing the QB shuffle that seems to be as much of a threat to the offense’s own rhythm as it is to the defense.

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[Still] In pursuit of a first trip to the college football playoffs, the 2024 Penn State Nittany Lions must escape the undertow of their past.

Sponsor: FTB’s 2024 Penn State football coverage is sponsored by the Sports Medicine specialists at Concierge Medical Associates. Schedule an in-person or remote consultation at: conciergemedical.ai

Well, here we are again.

Last season, I kicked off the inaugural column in this space waxing poetic about the journey of each college football season, gently reminding readers to pause, reflect, and enjoy the little moments on a metaphorical voyage we all hoped would take the Nittany Lions, and all of us along with them, to a place none of us had ever been: the playoffs. Just a sampling of my message about our personal roles in the ongoing saga of Penn State football…

“And as we all are experiencing these personal journeys, we are also then connected to broader, intersecting storylines that link generations and blur boundaries. Renowned chemist Evan Pugh heeding the call of his native Pennsylvania to sail across the Atlantic and found a college amid cornfields and cow pastures, sons of steelworkers spellbound by the sales pitch of a wily would-be lawyer turned football coach, raucous fans dumping a car into the duck pond, lining College Avenue for a national championship parade, or flooding onto the field after an upset of Ohio State, a wide-eyed student less than two weeks into the college experience emerging from a dark tunnel to behold her first ever White Out. They’re all there, ghosts of what came before and what yet may be, countless strand upon strand of stories old and new – stories of people and the place they came to love – that brush gently up against you like the evening breeze off Mount Nittany.”

All of that is still true! And I still believe it, or at least I hope I do. Perhaps it’s merely a temporary fit of ennui or some sort of mild mid-life crisis, but the optimistic enthusiasm with which I began last season eludes me.  As the influx of money and onset of instability have mauled college football almost beyond recognition these last years, I’ve found myself grasping to hold onto what made it special, and my grip grows increasingly tenuous. Closer to home, I cannot deny that frustration from the team’s repeated failures in the biggest moments has compounded over time. My follow-up to that first column last year, explaining my theory for why far more fans are feeling far less charitable towards James Franklin than I do, concluded that 2023, with a top-ranked quarterback and generational defense, was finally State’s moment to shit or get off the pot and make the playoffs. “They damn well better,” I wrote. They did not. Again.

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Writing a Penn State football column based on a (series of) Taylor Swift song(s) is akin to bringing an opera fan to a monster truck rally, but it’s August, and the season can’t start soon enough. The most popular pop artist in the world is currently in the midst of her Eras Tour, a tribute to the various evolutions of her music.

With Penn State about to kick off a season with its sixth offensive coordinator in the last 10 years, it’s worth looking back at the differences between the Nittany Lions’ offensive eras and what clues they might provide on how 2024 might go. With apologies to Taylor Swift Penn State fans no one, here goes nothing.

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Sisyphus was a king in ancient Greece who ruled with an iron fist. The gods, angry at him for killing visitors to his land, punished him by forcing him to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down each time it approached the summit, for eternity.

James Franklin has now ruled the kingdom of Penn State football for more than a decade, and each time the Nittany Lions appear as though they’re about to reach the summit of college football’s elite, they backslide. The 52-year-old coach has proven quite adept at pushing the proverbial boulder most of the way up the hill, as evidenced by both the four top-10 finishes in the past eight years and the team’s current preseason ranking of No. 8. That he hasn’t gotten it the whole way up, and down the other side, is an increasing sore spot for his kingdom, and each year that passes causes a few more observers to wonder how close to Sisyphus’ plight Franklin truly is.

The coming 2024 season, however, threatens to break the cycle, one way or the other. There is a chance, a not-that-crazy chance, that a few things that haven’t clicked for Penn State during the last few years will click, and a spot in the expanded playoff is there for the taking. The Nittany Lions have one of the nation’s most talented running back rooms, a quarterback who at least has the potential to be more dynamic than he showed in a productive but frustrating first year as a starter, and an offensive coordinator who has a proven proclivity for getting dudes into open spaces with the football. The defense is once again deep and athletic, dotted with potential All-Americans and led by a savvy veteran defensive coordinator who has, like that aforementioned offensive coordinator, done some impressive stuff with a lot less talent than he’ll have at his disposal this fall.

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As Penn State enters 2024 toting a sack full of question marks at WR, the lion’s share of optimism related to the passing game rests inside Andy Kotelnicki’s big, beautiful brain.

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In early July, I received this less-than-concise email from my editor:

It feels like 100 percent of the optimism around the Penn State passing game entering 2024 isn’t that the WRs improve, or Drew Allar takes the next step, BUT RATHER that Andy Kotelnicki can “scheme guys open.” I’ve heard this mentioned multiple times on various outlets.

So here’s the article: 1. Intro: Is “scheming guys open” real, or it is just some bulls**t talking point pundits use when you’re stuck with mediocre skill guys? Then 2. The Beef: If that’s the case, just how does Andy Kotelnicki scheme guys open?

Thankfully, the answer to Question 1 is an emphatic YES…or else, this would have been a real Shetland Pony of a blog post.

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