On the road with trends, streaks, records, and unsettled scores in a game that’s become overrated for being “underrated.”

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023  football coverage is sponsored by FANATICS. Gear up for the Sept. 23 Penn State White Out vs. Iowa with t-shirts, shorts, ball caps, and player jerseys from FTB’s Fanatics store right HERE.

“Penn State better not sleep on Illinois.”

Trust me; they won’t.

Over the course of the offseason, what began as the go-to highbrow talking point on the Nittany Lions’ 2023 slate slowly morphed into the laziest take of the litter: this Week 3 road trip’s status as a classic “trap game.” Setting aside the flaws inherent to the argument at its outset – Illinois saw terrific defensive backs selected in the first three rounds of April’s NFL draft along with offensive lynchpin RB Chase Brown; this is not a program that simply reloads – and the team’s less than intimidating 1-1 start to the season, the sheer volume of “trap game” takes alone was enough to ensure Illinois isn’t sneaking up on anybody. At some point, this game became overrated for being “underrated.”

So let’s dispense with all that clap trap (game). If this team even approaches what we and most pundits believe them to be, they won’t lose to the Illini. But since this column is all about setting the weekly narrative, here are three other storylines I’m tracking as the Nittany Lions prepare to don their (as the kids say) icy road whites for the first time in 2023…

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Let It Flow, Let Yourself Go, Slow and Low, That Is The TemPro

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WARNING: The following image depicts graphic grass-stained content and scenes of excess mass, a bunch of Eastern European last names on the back of jerseys, plodding gains, 18 program-required knee braces, and foretells a never-ending cycle of overtime ineptitude that some might find disturbing.

Viewer (reader?) discretion is advised.

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It’s hideous! Oh, the humanity! Avert your gaze, children! (shudders)

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41 plays of suffocating dominance sans one 66-yard hiccup for six that we’ll dissect like it’s the freakin’ Zapruder Film.

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BOX SCORE          FTB CHARTING

OK, open up your laptop and go to peacocktv.com.

No, you don’t have to type out ‘www.’ I mean, you can if you want…you just don’t have to. This isn’t 1999. Know what, it’s not a big deal. Just get to the Peacock homepage. OK, good.

All right, up in the upper right there, click on your account profile. Yeah, the upper right. Right ther…no….yeah, right there. Click the blue bird. You’re the blue bird. See it’s got your name right underneath.

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Spoiler Alert for those of you stuck at a wedding (or worse) this past Saturday who have yet to watch the replay of the Penn State-Delaware “contest”: The fighting Blue Hens were  predictably overmatched EVERYWHERE. Line of Scrimmage. Perimeter. All points in between.

But for the sake of this blog post, let’s focus our attention upfront, where the big eaters roam.

Traditionally, the simplest way to take full advantage of a talent/size discrepancy along the line of scrimmage is through gap-scheme runs. While Mike Yurcich has primarily leaned upon a zone-based run scheme throughout his tenure as an offensive coordinator, starting last year he mixed in more gap-scheme plays so that he’d be able to counter different defensive fronts.

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Guarantee games are the worrrrrrrst.

But, everyone plays them, and until no one plays them, everyone will continue to play them. College football coaches take no prisoners and spare no expense to get a chance at a playoff berth/shot at a natty, and if that means putting a win on the schedule that barely qualifies as such, kinda like Penn State’s 63-7 pasting of FCS Delaware, consider it done.

While these games have seemingly little value for folks other than the true football sickos (hi, guys), 6-year-olds who are learning the game or the families of the third-teamers who actually get to see their sons play, they can be mildly instructive when it comes to A) gauging the overall health of the program by the respective quality levels of its depth chart and B) seeing how fundamentally prepared/mentally disciplined each of those levels are between the whistles.

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• Hey! HEY! Yeah YOU: conference commissioners, TV execs, athletic directors, and university presidents! If your unquenchable longing to dive head-first in Scrooge McDuck swimmable gold-coin vaults bastardizes everything we used to love about college football, can you at least to put rest these lamb-to-the-slaughter FCS schedule-filling Saturdays while you’re hard at work ruining the sport? Please! We’re begging you! Watching this curb-stomping was a chore, at best. Paying $5.99 for the privilege to do so made me sit and reflect on where my life went so wrong. My dream is that the TV networks/streaming services demand for a better on-field product pressures the Big Ten into upping the conference schedule to 12 games (6 home, 6 away) with each team adding an out-of-conference FBS Week 0 home opponent (UMass, Kent State, Georgia, Louisiana-Monroe, Temple, IDC…just as long as they’re FBS) to ensure schools seven games worth of ticket/chicken basket revenue.

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To fully grasp why Penn State fans have placed so many of their emotional eggs into this season’s basket, it’s mandatory to take a step back and piece together the confluence of unexpected events that brought us to the cusp of this highly-anticipated crescendo.

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There’s an incredible amount of enthusiasm and confidence around Penn State football right now, and last week’s result (Drew Allar especially) did nothing to stifle it. If you’re following the team, you see and hear it everywhere: Fans genuinely believe this is the group that will contend for the playoff and maybe even win it all.

There’s an underlying sentiment implied in these statements: “They damn well better.”

I said it myself in my inaugural column here last week – “Anything less than 11-1 will be a disappointment.” – and this offseason, I’ve often found myself hearing and using phrases like “no more excuses” or exhorting James and his staff to relieve themselves or free up the toilet for others to use. Sure, fans of most power programs harbor perpetually high expectations, and preseason optimism is generally unremarkable, but there’s an acutely restless undercurrent to it in Happy Valley right now.

Why is that we’re all feeling so antsy? James Franklin, and especially Sandy Barbour, will hold up the historic run of four 11-win seasons in the last seven (conveniently omitting that the regular season used to be only 10 or 11 games), and State’s Rose Bowl victory means James is already halfway to running the New Years Six gamut only a decade into his tenure. On the whole, things seem pretty good. So what gives?

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While the Nittany Lions cleared up several cloudy areas (ahem, QB play) in the season opener, presumed no-brainer positions of strength (OL, RB) raised a few eyebrows…and not in a good way.

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023  football coverage is sponsored by FANATICS. Gear up for the Sept. 23 Penn State White Out vs. Iowa with t-shirts, shorts, ball caps, and player jerseys from FTB’s Fanatics store right HERE.

BOX SCORE               FTB CHARTING

Huzzah! The permed-hair prince who was promised!

On the Beaver Stadium scoreboard, Drew Allar is announced as the starting QB vs. West Virginia … 26 minutes before kickoff pic.twitter.com/hA0fr1RM2S

— Mike Poorman (@PSUPoorman) September 2, 2023

At approximately 7:05 p.m., a PA announcer no one apparently likes (poor guy) finally revealed the best-kept secret since up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start Button to the largest college football crowd found anywhere last Saturday (check ya math, Michigan).

From the settled dust of a fierce competition rivaling historic heated tilts like Hammer v. Nail and Obese Man v. Buffet, Penn State sophomore Drew Allar emerged victorious, edging out heel-nippers Beau Pribula and Jaxon Smolik for the starting QB role.

And for all the eye rolls and “come on’s” hurled James Franklin’s direction over the course of the past 5 weeks, perhaps the head coach’s decision to hide his cards and not show his hand until NBC was halfway through the clunkiest pregame show in the history of television was a shrewd, tactical, ingenious ploy.

Because, man, West Virginia looked completely unprepared for Allar’s coronation, didn’t it?

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