Imagine if the rest of life worked the way the transfer portal has now given coaches and schools a second chance to land the big recruit fish they missed out on the first time around.
You ask your dream girl to prom, only to watch her go with your high school nemesis instead … and then she spends a week at the beach with you after graduation.
You don’t get the job after nailing all of the interviews, wind up taking a position you’re just OK with at another company … and then the first company calls back six months later and offers you the position you interviewed for but with better benefits.
You get out-bid for the house you (but mostly your wife) really, really wanted … and then the new buyer backs out at the last minute and the seller calls you instead of putting the house back on the market.
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Welp, the highly-anticipated season finale and last unchecked NY6 bowl win “box” on Penn State’s program checklist was a tough watch. No way around it. Season-long themes remained true: out of sync, stagnancy that produced little to no explosive offense. It’s also worth noting that PSU was missing some of their top players. Negatives aside, let’s take a look at one of, if not the only, exciting offensive play of the afternoon.
Fun.
Sometimes the opt outs don’t have a huge effect given the relative strength of the two teams in the bowl game or the matchups on the field. Other times you wind up wondering stuff like “Would Kalen King and Johnny Dixon have fared any better against a razor-sharp Jaxson Dart and his strong receiving corps than Cam Miller and Zion Tracy?” or “Would Manny Diaz have been able to make a few more moves on the chess board to match Lane Kiffin’s offensive creativity than Anthony Poindexter and Terry Smith?”
With the caveat that bowl matchups, even those of the New Year’s Six variety, almost never have both teams at the fullest versions of themselves these days, it was mildly disappointing not to see those matchups, or how Chop Robinson and Olu Fashanu, the Nittany Lions’ two best players in 2023, would have played against just the third quality opponent on the schedule.
But none of those things affected the outcome anywhere close to the same way the issue that had nothing to do with opt outs or coaching changes, the issue that has been the issue for Penn State this season, did in the Nittany Lions’ 38-25 loss to Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl.
The Peach Bowl features two major conference foes with many similarities, including a desire to validate a 10-win season that left many critics unimpressed.
Sponsor: For The Blogy’s 2023 football coverage 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.
We began this series of columns back in September by talking about the journey of a college football season as a story told in weekly installments. As we come to the end of this year’s journey, the Nittany Lions will conclude their 2023 campaign by facing an opponent that followed a strikingly similar path with many comparable story beats.
Penn State and Ole Miss fielded excellent squads that spent portions of the season ranked in the top 10, dominated the weaker foes on their schedules, faced questions about whether their ace-recruiter head coaches could win big games, and ultimately frustrated their fans with losses to their two marquee conference opponents. In the case of each school, one side of the ball carried the load; offense for the Rebels and defense for PSU. Now these teams arrive in Atlanta seeking to validate 10-win seasons that left critics questioning how good they really are. Each will play without their top edge rusher, but otherwise managed to staunch the bowl opt-out bleeding.
Happy holidays, Penn State fans. May it be a true season of giving for your families and friends.
And your beloved football program.
James Franklin put a bow on another top-20 recruiting class this week, the ninth time he has done so in the 10 recruiting cycles in which he’s led the Nittany Lions per the 247 Sports Composite rankings (and the 10th time, Penn State finished 21st). Recruiting is how he made his bones, and whether it’s getting the top players from Pennsylvania in most years or finding some under-the-radar gems in both expected and unexpected recruiting pockets around the country, Franklin has pretty consistently delivered on that front, if not at quite an elite level, and that’s with coordinators coming and going at nearly the speed of the transfer portal itself.