A not-so-long time from now, in a college football galaxy not so far-fetched …

It’s 2032. Penn State, having dispatched Michigan, Ohio State, USC, Oregon, Boise State, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Florida State, Central Michigan, BYU, and Navy to win the Big Ten (which now includes 36 teams), clinches a 2 seed in the 16-team playoff.

Nittany Lion fans are excited for many reasons, including that it represents the program’s first conference title since 2016, and that Penn State will get to host at least one playoff game in Beaver Stadium, which now seats a cozy 85,000 thanks to a six-year renovation process that cost a mere $3.2 billion. Playoff tickets cost $450-700 apiece, which represents only a slight per-game increase from the season ticket package. Plans are underway to erect a 2,000-square foot sportsbook on the concourse, which is expected to generate an additional $2 million in revenue for the university each year.

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Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023-24 Sunday Column 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.

The most important person on the Penn State football team in 2024 isn’t Drew Allar.

It’s not Nick Singleton.

It’s not super-jacked linebacker-turned defensive end Abdul Carter, nor prodigal son wide receiver Julian Fleming.

It’s not James Franklin.

No, the one guy who will have the most influence on whether the Nittany Lions finally return to the national championship summit, make the elusive first playoff appearance, or have another so-so, ho-hum 10-3 campaign is Andy Kotelnicki, the new offensive coordinator.

Now, he’s going to need a lot of help, from all of the guys mentioned above, plus returning starters like Kaytron Allen and Tyler Warren and KJ Winston, and guys stepping into larger roles like Dani Dennis-Sutton and Drew Shelton and Tony Rojas, and from the other new coordinators, Tom Allen and Justin Lustig, and from strength coach Chuck Losey and his staff, and … you get it. Ultimate team sport, lots of moving parts, calories to consume and playbooks to study etc. etc.

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Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023-24 Sunday Column 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.

5 + 7 = 14.

No, this isn’t the new math your kids are learning in schools, but it’s how math works in college football these days. Before the digital ink dried on the CFP press release announcing the new “5+7” 12-team format (five highest-ranked conference champs plus seven at-large berths) that model became instantly antiquated as word leaked that discussions on how to shift it to a 14-team field by as early as 2026 were already underway.

More teams, of course, playing for the biggest trophy at the end of the season means more money for a sport that is already Scrooge McDucking it, but it also means more opportunities for more teams. At least in theory.

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We all want to hold on to at least a bit of the past, if only because we tend to remember the good times a touch more fondly than maybe they actually deserved. James Franklin took on a somewhat wistful tone this week when, speaking in the context of the transfer portal and NIL, he said, “The reality is the college football that we’ve all known, the college athletics that we’ve all known, that’s not coming back.”

And then there is Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano, who decided this week, with a few others, to bring a controversial chunk of the football program’s past back into the present and future by presenting a resolution to name the Beaver Stadium playing surface for longtime head coach Joe Paterno to the rest of the university’s trustees.

Let me get two important disclaimers out of the way here. First, I have no desire to weigh in on whether Paterno deserves such a posthumous honor, on how his legacy or his family have been treated by the university (now on its third president and third athletic director since he died in 2012), and certainly not on how much culpability he should be assigned for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes or how Penn State handled them. The second is that I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that the stadium turf will bear his name in the near future, barring a nine-figure donation being attached to it, of course.

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For new Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, the “why” behind his prevalent use of RPOs – the three-letter cornerstone of modern football that’s often treated like a repulsive four-letter word while keyboard thumpers melt on message boards – is best explained through a childhood toy for nerds.

It’s called a Hoberman Sphere. If your parents never bought you one, congratulations.

Invented before fun, the Hoberman Sphere is a colorful, plastic, finger-pinching geodesic dome capable of massive contraction/expansion that can be either symmetrical or irregular depending on which jagged joints are pushed and/or pulled. If you got suckered into chaperoning school field trips to any Science Center or Children’s Museum in the past 30 or so years, you’ve likely seen stacks of them in the gift shop go untouched.

So what the heck does this have to do with Kotelnicki’s catalog of RPOs?

Glad you asked, lazy transition device.

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Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023 Sunday Column 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.

The worst part of watching Penn State men’s basketball during its inglorious Big Ten history hasn’t been the frequent defeats as much as the predictability.

For so many years, in almost every game, you knew the basic range of outcomes — narrow win against an equally mediocre opponent, hard-fought loss against a mid-tier foe, lopsided defeat to a top-10 squad — almost before the game, hell, the season began. Sure, there were a few big upsets here and a couple blown games against less talented squads there, but for the most part, the Nittany Lions played to their level of talent, which was usually lacking compared to that of the majority of teams in their conference.

That has not been the case during the past month.

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Friday’s announcement of the Big Ten and SEC joining forces for an “advisory group” didn’t sound like so much of a declaration of all-out war against the NCAA as a mere reminder of the massive amount of firepower those conferences wield in the grand scheme of college athletics and college football in particular.

Commissioners Tony Petitti (pictured above next to NCAA president/frenemy Charlie Baker at a Senate Judiciary Hearing) and Greg Sankey used carefully parsed language in the press release, which also included phrases like “address the significant challenges facing college athletics and opportunities for the betterment of the student-athlete experience” and the group “will engage with other constituencies as necessary.”

Loosely translated, the 259-word release said, “Figure your stuff out, NCAA, or we’ll figure it out ourselves.”

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