Micah Shrewsberry has done a lot of good stuff since he took over as the Penn State men’s basketball coach last year. He’s completed a couple of solid-to-strong recruiting classes, used the transfer portal to fill in some significant gaps left by departures that were no fault of his own, and, if you’re watching closely, has shown a grasp of Xs and Os that exceeds that of most of his Nittany Lion coaching predecessors.

However, he seems to have fallen into the trap that ensnared many of those predecessors and a sizable chunk of Penn State’s not-so-sizable men’s hoops fan base—namely, he thinks Big Ten officials are out to get him and his team.

To which I would say:

1. No they’re not.
2. If they are, the coach and his team need to try a few other tactics

The Nittany Lions’ mid-winter nose dive continued Saturday with a 74-68 loss at Maryland, their fourth straight defeat and fifth in the last six games. And a couple of quick looks at the final box underscore what have been two sticking points for Shrewsberry for the bulk of the season. The Terrapins shot 23 free throws to Penn State’s four. And Jalen Pickett, the do-it-all senior guard who spends more time with the ball in his hands than any other Nittany Lion, went to the free-throw line once, bringing his total free-throw attempts over the four-game losing streak to … one.

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Recruiting is not fantasy football, where a coach can look at his roster, see which areas are lacking, and acquire new players who will be immediate upgrades at those specific positions. They have to recruit the best players in the class regardless of position, and while that doesn’t mean signing 12 scholarship linemen and six running backs in the same class, for example, rather than a group spread more evenly over several positions, it doesn’t mean they’re going to fill the positions of need in every cycle, either.

Sometimes, though, the best players wind up being the players a program needs the most, and a glance at the top of Penn State’s Class of 2023 hints that the Nittany Lions could very well have gotten much better at a few positions at which they’ve struggled for several years.

The two highest-ranked players in the class, both top 60 players nationally according to the On3 consensus rankings, are offensive linemen Jven Williams and Alex Birchmeier. Two of the next seven highest-ranked signees are linebackers Tony Rojas and Ta’Mere Robinson.

Neither position group has lived up to its respective expectations in recent years at Penn State. Linebacker U did have Micah Parsons terrorizing Big Ten backfields for a couple of seasons, but prior to Parsons being named to the all-conference first team in 2019, the last Penn State linebacker to make that list was Mike Hull in 2014. (Rising sophomore Abdul Carter might have something to say about that this autumn.)

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It’s the time of year when many first-year college basketball players hit the freshman wall, that real or imagined phenomenon that is characterized by tired legs, questionable decision-making, and generally a lesser quality of play than the same player showed from November through mid-January.

Penn State’s freshmen haven’t logged nearly enough minutes to hit that freshman wall, which is good for them but not great for the present or future of the program.

The Nittany Lions, 13-7 overall and 4-5 in conference play entering Sunday’s game against Michigan, are very much in the NCAA Tournament mix thanks to one of the most experienced lineups in the entire nation, let alone the Big Ten. Jalen Pickett, Seth Lundy, Myles Dread, Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter have already played in a combined 633 games, and their bodies and their minds have gone through so many reps that any one of them would not be out of place as a fourth assistant coach.

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What’s old (like really old) is new again, as Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich’s 2021 flirtation with an antiquated alignment morphed into a full-blown infatuation in 2022.

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Apparently, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit didn’t get the memo.

In the dying breaths of the Rose Bowl’s 1^st quarter, beneath a gloomy, outlier Southern California sky that deceased journalistic windbag Grantland Rice would have gushed over in his run-on, 300-word, one-sentence lead in the next day’s newspaper, Penn State lined up in a T Formation for the 27^th time this season.

To those who diligently watched every game of Penn State’s bounceback 2022 campaign, this was no big deal – standard operating procedure in short-yardage situations.

And yet — as you’ll hear below if you click the video clip – both veteran announcers sounded absolutely bewildered/befuddled/flustered when the Nittany Lions suddenly whipped out this X’s and O’s antique near the goal line.

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Introduction

Throughout all the ebbs and flows of James Franklin’s eventful tenure at Penn State, the one constant year after year has been the Nittany Lions steady and strong defense (2020 notwithstanding, cough). No different in 2022. Despite all the off-season upheaval (losing 5 defenders in the NFL Draft, losing folksy-sounding DC Brent Pry to Virginia Tech, and bringing in a complete outsider in Manny Diaz) this year’s Penn State defense did more than maintain the status quo. They set a new standard of excellence.

Dominant but in a different way, Diaz’s defense leaned on arguably the best secondary in program history so that the front seven could unleash absolute chaos at the line of scrimmage.  The result? A savage Saturday symphony of sacks, strips, and swats. Man, it was beautiful, wasn’t it? But don’t just take my word for it…the basic and advanced defensive stats from this season back all of that up. Let’s dive in.

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Like Jay Bilas at the NBA Draft, expect to hear the word ‘UPSIDE’ repeated ad nauseam when announcers and pundits analyze Penn State’s newest out-of-market roster addition. 

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Score one for the Shields Building.

The rusty bike chain on Penn State’s Transfer Portal Schwinn during 2021-22 open recruiting windows, James Franklin’s calculated off-season lobbying about the University Park campus’ sluggish admissions process WD-40’d (verb) the turnaround time needed to get prospective student-athletes accepted and registered for classes just a year later.

Case in point: Malik McClain.

According to Sean Fitz of On3, the former Florida State sophomore receiver officially entered the Transfer Portal on Wednesday, January 11^th, took an official visit to Penn State on Sunday, January 15^th, and attended his first class at Penn State on Wednesday, January 18^th. No word if he was 10 minutes early or seated in the front row.

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If you made it through any of Penn State’s 13 games this season without the words “Drew Allar” escaping your lips or even running through your brain, you are likely part of a small minority of Nittany Lion fans who, despite what they might have thought about Sean Clifford, were and remain excited to see what the young stud QB can do when given full-time control of the offense.

With Clifford out of the picture and Allar the presumed favorite to answer that question, a couple of related queries spring to mind as the dust settles following the close of the first portal window:

Who the hell is he going to throw to? And who is going to coach them?

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Micah Shrewsberry, in the parlance of our times, has got that dawg in him.

The, um, underdawg, that is.

“I’m one of the ultimate underdog kind of guys,” the Nittany Lions’ basketball coach told The Athletic’s Brian Hamilton last spring. “Toughness will make up for it. We may not be as big as other people. Just be tougher than them.”

This quote, occurring more in the postseason of Shrewsberry’s first year at Penn State than the preseason of his second, was more than prophetic about the current rendition of the Nittany Lions. The roster, as he noted, does not have a lot of size, and Shrewsberry has arguably made it even smaller by eschewing the center position altogether for large stretches of the game. Six-foot-4 senior wing Myles Dread, not unaccustomed to guarding fours at various points of his career, is often seen playing man defense on fives, including Purdue’s behemoth center Zach Edey.

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