So, uh, 1-0?

Penn State put together all the ingredients for a feel-good Saturday after an occasionally sloppy but largely impressive opening win at West Virginia: a beautiful, sunny September afternoon, a MAC opponent they should handle without much difficulty, and a large home crowd full of fans who were ready to be optimistic about this team’s long-term chances, and perhaps drink a $12 beer or three.

Instead, the Nittany Lions learned some hard truths about themselves, the first and most significant being that the perceived easier path to the expanded playoff won’t matter much if they don’t figure some things out along that path the next few weeks, and the second being, for the first time in a while, that most of those things concerned the defense.

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A visit from the Bowling Green Falcons may not inspire excitement, but the team that showed up in Morgantown has the look of one we’ll have plenty of reason to cheer.

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When facing an opponent the caliber of Bowling Green, distraction is one of the greatest perils facing an ultra-talented team like Penn State, dreaming ambitious dreams and coming off the sort of exhilarating win that suggests they might just come true. With such promise on the horizon, you risk losing focus on the little details that make your immediate present a path to that imagined future.

While I don’t believe our Nittany Lions, relentlessly bombarded with – and seemingly bought into – Coach Franklin’s “1-0 this week” mantra, are at any risk of falling prey to this phenomenon, I’m sorry to report that I cannot say the same for myself. So here is my confession: This week’s column received the same treatment I routinely gave my homework, delayed and deferred until the 11^th hour and 59^th minute.

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Harrison “Trey” Wallace got the glory, but credit a former 5-star who had no targets on Saturday as the reason the first TD of the Kotelnicki Era happened when it did.

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Before you type in the comments section that I’m being hyperbolic when I say witnessing Penn State’s fun, innovative offensive portfolio on Saturday was like a personal spiritual revival, let me remind you of this:

You weren’t assigned to drill and extract interesting X’s and O’s nuggets from the “dry hole” that was Mike Yurcich’s playsheet on a weekly basis last year. I was. And unlike creepy 8-figure CEOs or Buffalo Bills fans, I derive no pleasure from pain.

What can’t be disputed, though, is that offensive explosivity is BACK in Happy Valley. Amongst offensive coordinators making their blue-and-white debuts in the James Franklin era, Andy Kotelnicki’s 7.62 yards per play average vs. West Virginia ranked No. 1 – almost a full yard better than runner-up John Donovan’s per play showing vs. UCF in Ireland a decade ago. So, yeah, it was refreshing to see some chunk plays, daydream of what may be, and irrationally formulate a bunch of feel-good, too-early overreactions from those explosives as a fan.

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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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