Sunday Column: A Feast-or-Famine Group of Nittany Lions is a Welcome Sight for a Hoops Fanbase Tired of Penn State’s Predictable Past

Sponsor: This edition of For The Blogy’s 2023 Sunday Column 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.

The worst part of watching Penn State men’s basketball during its inglorious Big Ten history hasn’t been the frequent defeats as much as the predictability.

For so many years, in almost every game, you knew the basic range of outcomes — narrow win against an equally mediocre opponent, hard-fought loss against a mid-tier foe, lopsided defeat to a top-10 squad — almost before the game, hell, the season began. Sure, there were a few big upsets here and a couple blown games against less talented squads there, but for the most part, the Nittany Lions played to their level of talent, which was usually lacking compared to that of the majority of teams in their conference.

That has not been the case during the past month.

These Nittany Lions, a group of players that was scattered far and wide both geographically and competitively this time a year ago and started to play together only this summer, are as predictable as the weather on a March afternoon in State College. After years of Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown in the Bryce Jordan Center, you aren’t sure whether this team will wind up flat on its back, booting a 50-yarder off the crossbar, or knocking Lucy cold, picking up the ball and running 40 yards for a touchdown.

Penn State has won four of its last six games and stands at 6-6 in the Big Ten, which seems almost unthinkable when you remember how out-of-sorts and droopy it looked only a couple of months ago. The Lions have won each of the last three games by double digits and two of those on the road, where they had been 0-4 prior to that.

What’s been fun and interesting about the streak is that, yes, this team is playing better both together — especially at the defensive end — and as individuals, but the bad habits and limitations that led to the 8-9, 2-4 start are, well, still kind of hanging around, which means that while opportunity for a sensational closing stretch like the 15-6 closing run in Thursday’s win over Iowa exists almost every night, so do opportunities for the sort of disasters that saw the Lions blow a 16-point second-half lead in a nine-point home loss to Minnesota.

Some of the wild variability on this team can be chalked up to the hasty way Mike Rhoades had to assemble it after he was hired at the end of March, when the remnants from the 2023 NCAA team had quickly dispersed when Micah Shrewsberry left; even in the fourth month of the season, the players are still figuring one another, and the coaches, out. But another big part of it is the way Rhoades wants this team to play. The Nittany Lions have been uber-aggressive defensively, trapping well above the timeline and darting into passing lanes before the ball is even thrown. This has led to conference-best stats in steals and turnovers forced but also to easy opportunities for opponents when the gambles don’t pay off and the rotations can’t catch up.

On offense, Penn State isn’t sharing the ball that much better or beating people off the dribble with players not named Baldwin or Clary much better than it was earlier in the season, but it’s making a lot more threes; the Nittany Lions are 24-45 from the arc in the last two games after shooting 31% in the first 21.

The caliber of opponent must also be addressed. Early-season wins over typically tough Michigan and Ohio State have gotten less impressive as the year has gone on, and though the upset of Wisconsin still looks good today, the current three-game win streak has been assembled against Rutgers, Indiana and Iowa squads that are a combined 16-20 in league play.

Again, though, a middle-of-the-pack type of team, which is what Penn State very much resembles at the moment, is head and shoulders above what the Lions looked like in the early part of the year and probably well beyond what they could have realistically hoped for. Many of the nine transfers haven’t panned out and Kanye Clary, the main contributor among the small number of returning players, has been injured for much of 2024. Penn State is playing a wide-open style of basketball best suited for a deep roster with a pretty small rotation, and it’s getting stronger, not wearing down, as the Big Ten enters the home stretch.

Does that mean the cold shooting stretches are gone for good? Doubtful. Does it mean good offensive teams won’t continue to find and exploit the cracks in a defense that’s still allowing a league-worst 46% percent shooting or that the Lions’ wonderfully inconsistent rebounding isn’t going to cost them a game or two? Probably not. But the bottom line is, you don’t know what you’re going to get from this flawed but fun group each time it takes the floor. And for that, anyone who has watched more than a few seasons of Penn State hoops should be thankful, whether this recent hot stretch continues or not, and hopeful about what Rhoades might be able to achieve in a future that looks much brighter than it did at the start of the year.