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. 

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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I didn’t see an All-American the first time I saw Jalen Pickett play.

It was one of the earlier games of the 2021-22 season, a sleepy November weeknight affair against a winless St. Francis Brooklyn squad. Pickett was 1-of-7 from the field and finished with four points, one board and three assists in 32 minutes. But it wasn’t the skimpy stat line that bothered me. It was his slow, deliberate approach; a lot of dribbles without a lot of movement toward the basket. I figured he was another small-conference transfer who was going to have trouble adjusting to the speed and length of Big Ten defenses.

A year and a half later, that same player is the hottest, arguably most unguardable player (not named Zach Edey) in the conference, and he’s dragging a team without a lot of other reliable options on offense and a less-than-lockdown defense toward an NCAA Tournament berth.

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