2023 Season

Strike Your Gait and Win

Photo courtesy of PSU Athletics (Mark Selders)

It may not be quite what we all expected, but the 4-0 Nittany Lions are winning in an impressive fashion that will serve them well down the line.

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“I run six plays, split veer. It’s like Novocain. Just give it time, it always works.”

– Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, “Remember the Titans”

 

“There’s no greater feeling than to be able to move a man from Point A to Point B against his will.”

– NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Russ Grimm

 

“I feel like everybody would prefer to have the one- or two-play drive… But it is a different type of satisfaction when you’re out there, and you’re 10, 12, 15 plays in… because you feel like whatever you could do, they can’t stop it.”

– Penn State offensive guard Saleem Wormley

These are two of my favorite football quotes (even though the latter is from a Pitt alum – nobody’s perfect, after all – and the former is fiction) followed by a key member of the 2023 Nittany Lions summing up how it felt to smother the Iowa Hawkeyes with methodical brute force. Taken together, they form a kind of short story about the first quarter of Penn State’s season.

To the extent some fans worried or grumbled after the Lions took apart West Virginia on national television to open this year’s campaign, it can be traced to the ways in which a dominant 38-15 outing still fell short of expectations rooted in preseason hype. In the eight months that elapsed between Penn State’s Rose Bowl win over Utah and the end of Summer training camp, this year’s team had been built up so much in people’s minds that some folks seemed to be expecting to see the 1994 offense and 1986 defense paired together from the opening snap. When every pass rush didn’t result in a sack and every Nick Singleton carry a 60-yard scamper, there was a palpable sense of, “What gives?”

Even a thorough beatdown of “just happy to be here” Delaware lacked the crowd-pleasing breakaway scores that characterized last season’s tune-up game against MAC-rifice Ohio; it was actually a Penn State defensive miscue allowing the Blue Hens to make the day’s biggest splash, a 66-yard run ending in their only points of the afternoon. The following week at Illinois, five takeaways helped offset an offense that started slowly and felt out of sync, but also put up over 30 points on the road. Iowa is built to capitalize on careless risk-taking, and Penn State deprived the Hawkeyes’ defense of oxygen, opting for long drives built through incremental gains. As James Franklin noted afterward, offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich “never got bored” with sticking to what worked.

Yurcich may not be getting bored, but the same can’t be said for many Penn State football fans, who are still waiting to see Nick Singleton making house calls or Drew Allar launching bombs downfield. Maybe that doesn’t matter all that much. In fact, maybe what’s happening on the offensive side of the ball right now is more important over the long haul. The nation’s 15th-ranked offense averages over 40 points and 450 yards per game, has scored at least 30 in every outing (a streak that stands at 11 games going back to last season), all while protecting the football (or “the program,” as Coach Franklin would say). They are winning at the line of scrimmage, gaining yards consistently on obvious running downs, chewing up clock with lengthy multi-play drives, staying ahead of schedule and racking up first downs, taking what is given and, as the game wears on, taking what they want. When we think back on the most frustrating and painful losses of James Franklin’s tenure, defeat often resulted from a demoralizing inability to do exactly these things.

For as much as James emphasizes winning “the explosive play battle,” through the first four games of 2023, Penn State is delivering variations on the program’s traditional winning themes – smothering defense complemented by efficient offense that kills you with execution. Those chunk plays will happen, but in the interim, these Nittany Lions are developing an identity around consistently dictating to the other team, moving them from point A to point B, even when they know it’s coming.

If your title contender is going to build a brand, especially early in the season, you could do a lot worse than “deep, talented roster that systematically grinds opponents into submission by patiently, relentlessly imposing their will.”

Like Novocain. Give it time, and it always works.

Penn State further burnished that identity in a historically dominant White Out victory over Iowa, beating surly old crank Kirk Ferentz at his own game. That work of art begs to be appreciated one final time before we move on, like Bryce Harper lingering momentarily to admire a home run ball’s trajectory before taking off to circle the bases.

Yes, this column mainly aspires to frame the weekly narrative by looking ahead at what’s to come, but when you cast out the phantoms of the past and do so with such flourish, it deserves to be placed in context. Penn State’s offense was efficient. The defense was stifling. It was an emphatic dismissal of every echo of the program’s painful past of coming up short versus Iowa.

And the memes were superb.

 

My compliments also go out to the bleacher creatures who packed Beaver Stadium to its limits and brought the noise, energy, and fun throughout the night and despite the weather. The high bar set by the White Out’s national reputation is the definition of a good problem to have, but it nevertheless demands a stadium environment that matches these lofty expectations. No doubt the memory of Iowa’s fans lustily jeering our injured players and the elder Ferentz suggesting that they’d “smelled a rat” lent a little extra zip to the Greatest Show in College Football. There was a familiar electricity crackling through the building late into the game as the raucous crowd energized the team, harried the opponent, enthralled recruits, and had an absolute blast the whole time. The Nittany Valley is a special place.

I wrote last week about the challenge of getting past Iowa and the attendant stigma they bring with them in order to move on to loftier goals and tougher tests. Well, the Nittany Lions passed muster and then some. All they needed to do was simply win, and we all would have been satisfied. Instead of a mere victory, however, we were gifted this beautiful drive chart to cherish and enjoy for years to come.

As we pass the quarter post, with the most treacherous trials still awaiting the Nittany Lions yet all our hopes still very much alive, we should also briefly pause to acknowledge and appreciate that we are being treated to a wildly fun season of college football. On the eve of its dissolution, the storied PAC-12 may be deepest conference in the country. Perennial playoff powers have shown hints of vulnerability and new challengers are rising. The race for the four playoff spots has never felt more wide open, just in time for the field’s impending expansion in 2024. September isn’t over, and we have watched Notre Dame blow its biggest regular season game in years by sending 10 guys out for a doomed goal line stand, embraced or condemned (or a little of both) the Coach Prime experiment at Colorado that, in one offseason, turned one of the most irrelevant programs in FBS into appointment television for over 10 million viewers, and even witnessed a fellow conference member institutionalizing the absurd sentence, “It is inappropriate to masturbate while on the phone with a University vendor,” into the official public record. There is no other sport like it.

So now we come to Northwestern. Poor Northwestern. If you’re younger and only started watching college football this century, you’ll probably struggle to appreciate the stunning turnaround the Wildcats’ football program experienced during their Rose Bowl run in 1995. Prior to that shocking 10-win campaign (coming off a 3-7-1 record the year before), Northwestern had averaged just two wins annually over the previous 30 years. Since that storybook breakout season, they have won an average of six games per year and claimed at least a share of three Big Ten titles. No single person did more to directly influence this reversal of fortunes than Pat Fitzgerald.

As an All-American linebacker, Fitzgerald led the ’95 Big Ten champions on the field and captured both the Nagurski and Bednarik Awards in consecutive seasons in 1995 and 1996 while also being named the conference’s defensive player of the year (coached by defensive coordinator and future great Penn State linebackers coach Ron Vanderlinden). Already a program legend, he returned to campus as an assistant coach in 2001 and stepped up under trying circumstances, taking over after head coach Randy Walker passed away in 2006. This gridiron hero who’d helped elevate Northwestern football to new heights as a player went on to oversee an era of unprecedented stability and success as a head coach. There may not have been a better fit between a coach and his employer in all of college football, which is why it was so shocking and tragic when it all unraveled so quickly on the eve of his seventeenth season. Even before this Summer’s meltdown, Northwestern was trending downward under Fitz (the Wildcats’ 1-11 record in 2022 was their worst in since going winless in 1989), and the turmoil of terminating the head coach and face of the program has left this team in shambles. They showed commendable tenacity in coming back to defeat (a probably lousy) Minnesota last week, but they are no match for mighty Penn State.

There are those weekends in every season that are as much about your team, the guys in your locker room and what they can take away from a game, as those clad in the opponent colors. The chaos and controversy that have swallowed Northwestern football are also diminishing fan attendance at a venue that was never renowned for its hostile environment. The Wildcats are averaging just over 17,000 attendees per game so far this season; the drab reverie of 11am in Evanston will be a stark departure from the controlled insanity of the White Out for the Nittany Lions on their second road trip of the year. Following the 2016 White Out victory over #2 Ohio State, James Franklin distributed juice boxes to the entire team, a reminder that, in contrast to the frenetic environment in which they had just shocked the world, the upcoming road trip to Purdue would require that they “bring their own juice.” That motivational stunt was for a visit to Ross-Ade Stadium, a veritable madhouse relative to the eerie silence that awaits this weekend. Penn State will require some intrinsic motivation to properly dispense with the formality of playing and winning this game – maybe they can conjure up a couple of those explosive plays and liven things up for both Mike Yurcich and everyone else.

I would be remiss, in terms of setting the mood, to overlook those moments when the Wildcats have intersected with program history. Northwestern shared the field with Penn State for two of the most notable wins of Joe Paterno’s storied career: His 323rd career victory, a road game versus the Cats in 2001, tied him with Alabama legend Bear Bryant, and he won his 400th at home against Northwestern in 2010. The thrilling Big Ten Championship season of 2005 would have been over before it really began absent Michael Robinson’s clutch connection with tight end Isaac Smolko on fourth down and the ensuing touchdown strike to freshman Derrick Williams. In 2012, Bill O’Brien got maximum effort from his incomparable seniors as Penn State notched its fourth straight win and first against a ranked opponent that year. All four contests involved thrilling comebacks and signature plays, from Zack Mills’ late-game heroics to Matt McGloin’s “Discount Double Check” touchdown celebration after one of most ungainly QB scrambles you’ll ever see.

I doubt this contest, in which Penn State is favored by nearly four touchdowns, will feature any such theatrics (I sure as hell hope not). Not every game day can come with hoopla and fanfare, and in this year’s Big Ten, many of them won’t. It’s a decidedly down year for the conference, so much so that after the obvious Big Three, Maryland and Rutgers may occupy their own second tier that’s a notch or two above the nine-team* dreck pooling below them (*Wisconsin’s potential non-dreck status TBD). Fans as well as players will have to “bring their own juice.”

But every Penn State football Saturday is a blessing, irrespective of national attention, a precious commodity to be treasured. Savor the hours spent watching our Nittany Lions overcome the monastic repose of Ryan Field and its woebegone Wildcats. We are promised no more than 12 of these each year, and every chance to go 1-0 is life or death when you’re trying to do it 15 times.

Three for the Road:
  1. Real talk: If my relative struggles to hammer out a column this week are any reflection of the team’s mindset, we may be in for another sluggish start on Saturday afternoon. On this week’s edition of the resurrected Obligatory PSU Podcast, my castmate Brandon Noble talked about the challenge of playing in the unsettling quiet at Northwestern and how it often takes a big play or bold play call to shake players out of their doldrums. If State comes out slow, watch for that “switch flip” moment.

 

  1. I am an absolute sucker for whatever dumb online voting thing offers Penn Staters a chance to claim a bit of hollow internet supremacy, especially during football season when school spirit is at its zenith (and even if it only results in Mike the Mailman winning 32 years’ worth of Utz potato chips). In that vein, congratulations to Penn State’s entire offensive line on becoming the first-ever unit honored with the Joe Moore Award’s #PancakeBlockoftheWeek. I don’t really know what this is or how long it has been around, but we won it, and we’re the first! #WeAre

 

  1. How much has college football changed since 2019? Back then, the “very online” portion of Penn State’s fanbase was tearing itself apart in a fit of fan-on-fan verbal violence over the University’s purported failure to invest in world-class athletics facilities. “Look, even Northwestern is running circles around us!” Today, NW’s massive commitment to overhauling the physical plant feels painfully outdated (and their besieged admin can’t backpedal fast enough) as the sport shifts focus to enticing quick-fix transfer players and lavishing recruits with lucrative NIL deals. Extravagant dorms, flight simulators, and lazy rivers may all still play a role, but building fancy playgrounds has taken a back seat to offering cold-hard cash.

September 28, 2023by FTB Chris