Two Penn State football developments this past week indicated two levels of risk. Both hinted very strongly that James Franklin feels pretty good about where his program is.

The announcement of former defensive end and defensive assistant Deion Barnes as the team’s new defensive line coach was a popular one among much of the fan base and, as a short video released by the team showed, even more popular with the players. And it’s not hard to see why. Barnes possesses just about every quality you would like to see in a young coach: He’s played the game at a high level, earning Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors in 2012, has a knack for teaching it, has recruiting ties in a relatively key region, and has the sort of grinder mentality one needs to survive the ultracompetitive world of college football.

He’s missing one quality, though: This is his first big-boy coaching job.

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Part of what made Penn State’s run to the championship final of the Big Ten Tournament remarkable was the knowledge that the Nittany Lions hadn’t even played their best basketball in wins over Illinois, Northwestern and Indiana (and very nearly Purdue). They were very much gritty, and not pretty, and though there was something meaningful in that, those who had closely watched Penn State the entire season knew the Lions had more to give.

They showed that and then some in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

Penn State utterly dominated a very good SEC team Thursday in both halves of a 76-59 win in Des Moines to pick up its first win in college basketball’s big tournament in more than 8,000 days. If that sounds like a long time, it probably was only slightly longer than what the 40 minutes must have felt like to the Aggies, who were little more than bystanders as Andrew Funk rained threes, Jalen Pickett, um, picked their defense apart, and the rest of the Nittany Lions filled their various roles expertly.

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Introduction

Like many of you, I have been a huge Penn State basketball fan for my entire life the entire month of March.

A deep, somewhat unexpected run in the Big Ten Tournament that saw wins over Illinois, Northwestern, and Indiana (and an almost-win vs. Purdue in the title gam), propelled the Nittany Lions to their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2011. In fact, this is only the third time this century that Penn State received an invitation to college basketball’s Big Dance.

This 2022-23 transfer-heavy version of Penn State hoops plays a very fun brand of ball – from its  deep 3’s and air traffic controller-like stress, no matter if Micah Shrewsberry’s crew is winning or losing. It’s been a heckuva magic carpet ride thus far…and it’s not over.

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SPONSOR: Is this Heaven? Far from it…it’s Des Moines, Iowa. Regardless, STUBHUB has your tickets for Penn State’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in a dozen years. Find your seat HERE, using FTB’s STUBHUB LINK. 

Quick off-season recap for those of you who live off the grid but somehow manage to read this blog…North Carolina DB Storm Duck waddled his way to Happy Valley. As of this typing, Penn State still hasn’t hired a defensive line coach. And Kent State WR Dante Cephas (a Pittsburgh native) chose Penn State over Pitt in the transfer portal this winter — yet another knife in the back for Panthers fans who insist they’re on the same level as the Nittany Lions.

Our hearts certainly go out to them in this trying time.

Alright, enough with the punching down. At the risk of counting unhatched chickens, in 2023 Penn State should field one of the most loaded teams (if not THE™ most loaded team) in the James Franklin era. Talent wins games, sure, but depth captures banners. At least that’s what we’ve told ourselves to justify this blog post. Therefore, let’s take a look at some of the unanswered questions on this year’s depth chart as the spring practice schedule begins on Tuesday.

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SPONSOR: Is this Heaven? Far from it…it’s Des Moines, Iowa. Regardless, STUBHUB has your tickets for Penn State’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in a dozen years. Find your seat HERE, using FTB’s STUBHUB LINK. 

Penn State’s Little Engine That Could ran into a tank on Sunday in the form of Purdue big man Zach Edey.

And then the Nittany Lions called an Uber and nearly got to their destination anyway before falling 67-65 to the Boilermakers in the Big Ten championship game.

On paper, the final result made sense considering that Purdue had been the best team in the conference the entire season and also considering that the best center in the country, while a difficult matchup for any college team, was an essentially impossible matchup for a team that plays a good chunk of its minutes without a true big on the floor.

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“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

 -Thomas Carlyle, 19^th-century Scottish philosopher

The past is a wasteland. The future is uncertain and a lot more ominous than it was a few weeks ago.

The Penn State men’s basketball present, however, is something to be savored.

The Nittany Lions, essentially left for dead after blowing a huge second-half lead in an eventual loss to Rutgers on Feb. 26, are firmly in the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2011 and will play Purdue on Sunday for the Big Ten Tournament title. That’s awesome in and of itself but what’s even better is that very few teams in the country are playing better ball (at least for stretches) than the Nittany Lions are at the moment.

What we’re seeing is a run like few Penn State teams have ever experienced, and Nittany Lion fans should soak it up for all it’s worth, for a few reasons.

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Like The Masters, lying about your inability to be impartial when selected for jury duty, and co-workers guilting you into buying six boxes of Thin Mints and four boxes of Tag-A-Longs, PSU message board meatballs (of which we are  proud card-carrying members) drawing unfounded conclusions from player height and weight fluctuations is truly a tradition unlike any other.

Last week, Penn State dropped some scraps in the content-starved media’s slop bucket with the release of an updated 2023 roster. Here’s what stood out to us:

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The NFL Combine is where the (apologies to Rick James) superfreak athletes of college football separate themselves from the mere everyday freaks, where (apologies to Eric Roberts) the best of the best can go from a fringe first-rounder to a top-10 pick, from a fringe draftee to a second-day selection, and earn themselves a good deal of money in the process.

Penn State has had its fair share of superfreak performances at the combine over the years, from Parsons to Barkley to… Apke and from dozens of other players who may not have made the same type of headlines but, whether it was with an impressive jump or a surprising 40 time, improved their stock during the week.

It’s been a different story for the seven Nittany Lions at this year’s combine. None of them would have qualified as true athletic freaks going in, and they largely did very little to change that with their respective performances.

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This 4-man blitz popularized by current Baylor HC Dave Aranda roughly a decade ago is probably the ‘safest’ pressure package in Manny Diaz’s Balls-to-the-Wall defensive binder.

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On Dec. 17, 2021, new Penn State defensive coordinator Manny Diaz – still very much a stranger in a strange place on that date – “met” with the local media for the first time over Zoom.

After a series of clunky, repetitive, and unnecessary pleasantries from every reporter asking a question from their bedroom/home office, multiple inquires seeking more details on how Miami did him dirty, and even some prodding into his ‘Grand Opening, Grand Closing’ 18-day tenure as Temple’s head coach in 2018, we finally got to the good stuff: What’s a Manny Diaz defense all about?

“Philosophically, (former Penn State DC) Bob (Shoop) and I are very closely aligned in the way that we like to be aggressive, attack-pressure defenses,” Diaz said that day.

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