Sunday Column 2.0: Even In Defeat, Nittany Lions Maintain Momentum as They Eye Next Challenge

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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.

But the Nittany Lions had been defying paper for the entirety of March, chewing their way through the back half of the regular season schedule and the tournament bracket and knocking off teams with better records and better talent by sticking firmly to their unorthodox game plan and with coach-of-the-moment Micah Shrewsberry pushing every right button.

And, after going down by 17 late in the second half, the Nittany Lions fought through heavy legs and spotty shooting and, frankly, common sense to make a spirited run that came up just short, capping a memorable weekend in Chicago and allowing them to carry plenty of momentum into the NCAA Tournament when it seemed, for most of the afternoon, that they had lost it.

There were some cold, hard reminders of the limitations of this team on Sunday. The Nittany Lions, as is their custom, did not send bodies to the offensive glass, but they also did not do a great job blocking out on defense, allowing plenty of Boilermakers other than Edey to grab or tip misses and create extra possessions. Purdue plays with the sort of determination at closing out shooters and fighting through screens that you might expect from a team that knows it has a 7-foot-4 equalizer in the paint if they happen to overplay. With Jalen Pickett hesitant to pull the trigger from the paint or go all the way to the rim for fear of the solar eclipse that Edey presents, the other Purdue defenders were free to focus on taking away 3-point shots, and though they had some late success in taking the ball to the basket, the lack of triples (7-of-23 on the day) from a team built on 3-point shooting proved too much to overcome.

You wouldn’t hear anyone on the Penn State side admit it, but you could see fatigue becoming a factor in the second half for the Nittany Lions, who had played two regulation games and one overtime game since Thursday, going with their typically tight rotation in all three. We saw a bit of Dallion Johnson in the first half and Evan Mahaffey in the second, but it was pretty much the top eight players we’d seen down the stretch, with lead dogs Pickett and Seth Lundy logging the heaviest minutes. Down double digits midway through the second half, the Nittany Lions started pressing a bit, getting more risky with their passing and taking more chances on defense, many of them resulting in fouls, and Purdue looked like it had a third comfortable win this season against its former assistant coach.

But in addition to the limitations, we also saw the competitive spirit, focused team defense, and ability to rapidly turn a game around with quick scoring spurts that has made Penn State such a tough out over the last month. This is a team that believes it is in the game until the very last horn, and even Sunday, against a far superior unit, it continues to back up that belief with its play. Penn State has proven it doesn’t need to play a perfect game, or even a complete 40-minute game, to defeat quality opponents, and though this appeared destined to be the kind of lopsided loss that can eat away at some of that confidence, it wound up being the sort of defeat that might actually build upon that growing confidence. At the least, it should create a hunger for redemption that could help the Nittany Lions on Thursday against a Texas A&M team that, a lopsided loss to Alabama in the SEC Tournament final notwithstanding, has won 10 of its last 12 games, including upsets of the Crimson Tide and Tennessee.

A&M presents a nice contrast in style to Penn State; the Aggies shoot more free throws than any team in the SEC (25.3 per game) and shoot fewer 3-pointers (18.1) than all but one SEC team. Those numbers for Penn State are 12.2 and 27 per game, respectively. Texas A&M also has 10 players who average at least 10 minutes per game, compared to a Penn State team that sends Pickett, Lundy, and Andrew Funk out for more than 30 minutes per game apiece. The gap in speed and athleticism between A&M guards Wade Taylor and Tyrece Radford and the backcourts Penn State saw this weekend might not be far from the difference between Edey and Penn State’s bigs. Then again, those players likely haven’t seen Pickett’s version of Booty Ball, either.

One run ended Sunday, but barely. Both the stakes and the competition will be higher this week, but if the Nittany Lions can keep the same approach that served them so well for very nearly four full nights in Chicago, it might not be the last run we see from them this month.