Shake Off the Echoes

[Still] In pursuit of a first trip to the college football playoffs, the 2024 Penn State Nittany Lions must escape the undertow of their past.

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Well, here we are again.

Last season, I kicked off the inaugural column in this space waxing poetic about the journey of each college football season, gently reminding readers to pause, reflect, and enjoy the little moments on a metaphorical voyage we all hoped would take the Nittany Lions, and all of us along with them, to a place none of us had ever been: the playoffs. Just a sampling of my message about our personal roles in the ongoing saga of Penn State football…

“And as we all are experiencing these personal journeys, we are also then connected to broader, intersecting storylines that link generations and blur boundaries. Renowned chemist Evan Pugh heeding the call of his native Pennsylvania to sail across the Atlantic and found a college amid cornfields and cow pastures, sons of steelworkers spellbound by the sales pitch of a wily would-be lawyer turned football coach, raucous fans dumping a car into the duck pond, lining College Avenue for a national championship parade, or flooding onto the field after an upset of Ohio State, a wide-eyed student less than two weeks into the college experience emerging from a dark tunnel to behold her first ever White Out. They’re all there, ghosts of what came before and what yet may be, countless strand upon strand of stories old and new – stories of people and the place they came to love – that brush gently up against you like the evening breeze off Mount Nittany.”

All of that is still true! And I still believe it, or at least I hope I do. Perhaps it’s merely a temporary fit of ennui or some sort of mild mid-life crisis, but the optimistic enthusiasm with which I began last season eludes me.  As the influx of money and onset of instability have mauled college football almost beyond recognition these last years, I’ve found myself grasping to hold onto what made it special, and my grip grows increasingly tenuous. Closer to home, I cannot deny that frustration from the team’s repeated failures in the biggest moments has compounded over time. My follow-up to that first column last year, explaining my theory for why far more fans are feeling far less charitable towards James Franklin than I do, concluded that 2023, with a top-ranked quarterback and generational defense, was finally State’s moment to shit or get off the pot and make the playoffs. “They damn well better,” I wrote. They did not. Again.

As the final seconds ticked off the clock in Columbus last season, all the excitement and idealism drained from my body and spirit, giving way to a numb indifference while watching Michigan grind us into dust on our homefield and, eventually, to irritated embarrassment seeing Lane Kiffin stunting on a shell of the nation’s third-ranked defense in the Peach Bowl. For me, at least, the hollow feeling hasn’t wholly dissipated. Not just this latest playoff disappointment, but the infamous string of them over this last decade, have taken their toll. Hell, an earlier draft of this column included an entire section on Sisyphus eternally rolling his boulder up the hill and finding peace with your place in the universe, however futile.

“You cannot start off the season so bleak and cynical,” I thought. So let’s try to look at the bright side, even if there’s still an element of “going through the motions” to the whole affair.

Among a variety of alterations large and small (I am dreading the ways in which this staff might mangle clock management around the newly instituted two-minute warning), the most profound change to college football this season will be the expansion of the postseason tournament from four teams to 12. If you have made it this far, I know I need not reiterate the stats around how often perennial bridesmaid Penn State would have made the cut were the current model in use from 2016 onward. “Surely,” says the conventional wisdom in Happy Valley and beyond, “no team in America will benefit more from the expanded playoff than Penn State. How close have they come before, and how often? With a blockbuster 2022 recruiting class in the full flower of maturity, their moment is now!” Time will tell.

I am promising nothing, which is more than I am expecting. But again, I’m reminded that this is supposed to be the nominally uplifting part of the piece, so we will go ahead and indulge the many experts who are predicting that this is the year the Nittany Lions will make their long-deferred debut on the postseason stage.

Several of the innumerable playoff forecasts out right now predict a first-round matchup between Penn State and Notre Dame, with the home team flip-flopping depending on the analyst making the pick. Bottom line, not a few of the folks who are paid to write about this stuff envision a late-December college football playoff game in either State College or South Bend. I find myself yearning for such an outcome, not only for the obvious selling point that it necessarily involves State finally making it to the playoffs, but also because a meeting of such storied combatants in an on-campus setting conjures everything I want to continue loving about college football. By happenstance, and very much against my will, I stumbled upon the hook for this schizophrenic take on the 2024 Lions while pondering that admittedly enticing proposition for what promises to be one of the most intriguing regular seasons in the sport’s history.

Even as a maelstrom of change batters the sport, college football remains at its core an enterprise rooted in tradition. One of its oldest and best is forming strong opinions about the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football program, whether loathing that team and its nationwide network of sycophantic drones or conjuring whatever flimsy explanation for your steadfast devotion to them (rarely related, by the way, to having attended Notre Dame). I fall into the former category, indulging deeply in my freedom to resent the Golden Domers for all the vaunted, overstuffed iconography around their program that has been unceasingly forced on the public across every mass medium invented since the early 20^th century. From the Four Horsemen to Touchdown Jesus, from Rudy to the Leprechaun, and of course the lyrics to that fight song that I heard playing in my mind (and now, I’m sorry to say, probably yours too). “Wake up the echoes cheering her name.” Disgusting. In those words of the accursed Irish rallying cry coming unbidden to my mind, I found a theme for today’s meditation on the team we occasionally hate to love, coming by way of a team we love to hate.

Forget all that pretentious talk about waking up the echoes of an imagined past. That is so much Industrial Age mythmaking used to prop up perhaps the longest-running case of unearned arrogance in American sports. For this Penn State team, chasing that elusive playoff bid while fleeing the specter of those who tried before and failed (not unlike Chester Copperpot, to invoke a second Sean Astin property in as many paragraphs), the challenge will be to shake off the echoes. To be, in the parlance of our times, “unburdened by what has been,” not simply the weight of playing for a program with over 900 all-time wins and in a stadium seating north of 100,000, but also the nagging memories of deep disappointment that are slowly calcifying into college football’s version of the soft bigotry of low expectations. I could point to any number of genuine bright spots and encouraging signs around this football team, they exist in abundance, but I won’t. Whether it’s fair or not to punish this current group for the sins of their forebears, I will.

We have seen where inflated expectations have gotten us, and it is nowhere. So let’s start things off a little more modestly than we did last season. No soaring prose that tugs at the heartstrings, no lofty forecasts of the glory yet to come. Let’s learn from mistakes and missed opportunities. Earn the hype retroactively instead of manufacturing it pre-emptively. Under-promise and overdeliver.

In obsessively drilling his “1-0” mantra into the brains of his players, the media, and our fanbase, Coach Franklin seeks to guard against the tendency to look ahead and lose the thread of the moment. After a decade of playoff near-misses, maddening losses to overmatched opponents, and enough unfulfilled promise to fill a dozen more Presidential elections even worse than the one we’re currently enduring, I would submit that it offers another, equally appealing and valuable quality: If your attention is fixed in the present, you can’t get dragged down by the past.

Three for the Road:

Let’s talk a little football, shall we? In no particular order, here are three Nittany Lions who’ve already logged significant snaps in Blue and White, and yet need to be at a different level on Saturday for Penn State to silence the Mountaineer faithful.

1. Harrison Wallace III: Any insult to your intelligence, dear reader, in listing such an apparent choice is unintended. While the obvious answer may be lazy, it’s sometimes also the best. Last year’s receiving corps was among the worst I’ve seen at Penn State (maybe even in major college football). You want to talk about shaking off the echoes? Let’s talk about this maligned unit. They require an undisputed alpha, and Drew Allar needs a reliable playmaker. We know Tre Wallace possesses the skill set to be a true, Big Ten-caliber number one. If he can’t show it on game day, you can book your tickets for the Music City Bowl.

2. Drew Shelton: I’ll choose my words carefully, because I’m very nervous that I’ve already said too many positive things about Phil Trautwein and Penn State’s offensive line this Summer, and I don’t want to jinx anything. You can have all the cautious optimism in the world, it doesn’t change the fact that replacing three NFL-caliber offensive lineman, including both tackles, is a daunting task. For good or ill, a lot of that burden is going to fall on the former blue chipper filling the void left by Olu Fashanu, one of the best left tackles in program history. Shelton seems to have decisively fended off what many expected could become a heated position battle, which is a good sign, but he’ll need to justify the coaches’ faith early and often.

3. Amin Vanover: We like to think we know what we have in State’s starting edge rushers. Abdul Carter is a natural game wrecker who’s reported to have taken to defensive end like a fish to water. Dani Dennis-Sutton is the former composite five-star who improved with each season thus far. If either is less than advertised, we have big problems. But in Saturday’s hot, muggy conditions – and throughout the season – Deion Barnes will rely on his bench to help keep the starters fresh, and with Jameial Lyons out of the picture and Smith Vilbert a complete unknown at this point, the pressure to maintain the production level falls heavily on the veteran Vanover. If the less-heralded #15 can maximize his snaps as the disruptive influence he’s shown hints of being throughout his career, it will go a long way to shoring up one of the overall team strengths, the defensive line.