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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Happy holidays, Penn State fans. May it be a true season of giving for your families and friends.

And your beloved football program.

James Franklin put a bow on another top-20 recruiting class this week, the ninth time he has done so in the 10 recruiting cycles in which he’s led the Nittany Lions per the 247 Sports Composite rankings (and the 10^th time, Penn State finished 21^st). Recruiting is how he made his bones, and whether it’s getting the top players from Pennsylvania in most years or finding some under-the-radar gems in both expected and unexpected recruiting pockets around the country, Franklin has pretty consistently delivered on that front, if not at quite an elite level, and that’s with coordinators coming and going at nearly the speed of the transfer portal itself.

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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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One week from now the coveted Western PA prospect will sign with the Nittany Lions…but figuring out his ‘forever home’ between the white lines remains up in the air.

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.

Quinton Martin — the Commonwealth’s top-rated prep prospect in the 2023-24 recruiting cycle — spurned (among others) Ohio State and Michigan when he verbally committed to Penn State way back in April. Beyond the obvious benefit of landing a promising four-star athlete, Martin’s pledge to the Nittany Lions marked another notch in James Franklin’s “Dominate The State” bedpost as Pennsylvania’s top-ranked high school football talent picked the blue and white for the third year in a row.

Sidenote: Pitt (a quick 40-minute drive from Martin’s high school) was one of the “among others” not worth mentioning, by the way.

As a junior at Belle Vernon High School, Martin was a do-it-all, Groundskeeper-Willie-One-Man-Band for the (googles Belle Vernon’s team name) Leopards, responsible for 31 of his team’s 70 total TDs (22 rushing, 6 receiving, 2 punt return, 1 INT return). The 6-foot-2, 205-pound Swiss Army knife showed off his versatility in last year’s WPIAL finals at Acrisure Stadium, treating the yinzers to a sampler platter of scores (receiving, rushing, punt return). This past Saturday, he led Belle Vernon to its second consecutive state title with 157 yards on just 13 touches.

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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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