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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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An Alignment That Put The ‘Smashmouth’ In Mike Yurcich’s Smashmouth Spread At Oklahoma State, The Diamond Formation Has Been Re-Imagined In Happy Valley Thanks To A Collection Of Tight Ends That Can Do More Than Just Wreck Stuff. 

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As a fanboy of studying offensive football, I’m a sucker for some good wrinkles.

Not the wrinkles that suddenly appear the millisecond you blow out the candles on your 40^th birthday cake, nor the wrinkles you lazily try to smooth out of an unironed shirt on a rushed workday morning with sprinkles of tap water and a 5-minute tumble in the dryer (always does the trick). No, I’m talking about play-calling wrinkles – those delightful miniscule scheme adjustments that coordinators make as a season goes on.

In Week 8 vs. Ohio State, Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich finally flashed a formational wrinkle — a blast from the past dating back to his Okie State days – that had previously been oddly absent throughout his tenure in Happy Valley. It’s called the Diamond Formation.

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Penn State on Friday announced potential plans to consider a project of unspecified scope or cost – pending approval, of course.

Sigh.

However, in making this nowhere-near-definitive announcement during a board of trustees meeting and subsequent media release, university president Neeli Bendapudi confirmed that Beaver Stadium is going to receive a renovation rather than a replacement, which was not exactly surprising but probably nonetheless needed saying. Also of interest in the release was that “the project also has the potential to expand use beyond football game days.”

More on that second part in a bit. As for the big sorta-news, Bendapudi, newly minted athletic director Patrick Kraft, and the various other Penn State administrators who will be involved in the project will have some interesting decisions to make about the future of what has become, for better and worse, one of the most iconic venues in all of sport. And all that might be at stake is the loyalty of one of the largest and most passionate fan bases in the world.

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This rarely-used Run and Shoot concept within Mike Yurcich’s offense has been more ‘miss’ than ‘hit’ through two seasons in Happy Valley…but that could quickly change now that a certain someone is the QB in command. 

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The year is 1965 and Mouse Davis, a diminutive high school football coach in BFE, Oregon, is desperately searching for a solution to his “pissant” problem. By pissant (Mouse’s words, not ours) we mean that a bunch of stringy, short, skinny, sawed-off but swift young adults litter his roster.

So Mouse – a pissant himself, hence the nickname — picks up a book. Not just any book, though.

In a storyline that eerily parallels Biff Tannen’s rise to wealth/power in Back To The Future 2, Davis thumbs through a copy of Tiger Ellison’s book “Run and Shoot Football: Offense of the Future” – The Old Testament of Run and Shoot football, if you will – and it forever changes his life.

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