[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.
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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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