Sunday Column: Bruised Last Week, Lions Bleeding Out After Stunning Loss to Bruins

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The thing you have to remember about football is that it’s played — and coached — by human beings. And when those human beings reach a certain point, sometimes they’ve just had enough.

Maybe the UCLA Bruins were sick of being the laughingstock of the Power Four, let alone the Big Ten. Maybe they wanted to rally around  interim head coach Tim Skipper or its newly appointed offensive coordinator Jerry Neuheisel, who is the spitting image of his Tavern-loving father and called a pretty solid game on Saturday against a Penn State defense that hadn’t allowed much of anything to anyone through four games.

Whatever the case, the home team played like it had something to prove in the Rose Bowl, and it became the first 0-4 program to defeat a top-10 ranked opponent in 40 years.

But you don’t want to read about UCLA. You’re here for blood.

And that’s what Penn State is after what was supposed to be a get-right game against what had been the conference’s weakest team — bloody. And its coach, after six days of hearing the all-too-familiar refrain that he couldn’t win the big game, went and failed do to what he’s done better than almost anyone during his time here — win the non-big games.

James Franklin had won his last 34 games against unranked foes heading into Saturday dating back to 2021, and his Nittany Lions hadn’t lost in back-to-back weeks in 46 games. A bit of a hangover effect from last week’s White Out overtime loss to Oregon was to be expected, but unlike they had in many of those wins over unranked foes, the Lions never fully shook that hangover, nor the persistent failures in execution that had marked the first four games.

The Bruins, who had not had a lead all season until they went 75 yards for a touchdown on the game’s opening drive, tried to give this one away, failing to convert a fourth and one from inside their own 40 in the final minutes, after allowing one of the Penn State comeback touchdowns on a blocked punt.

But Penn State simply would not take it, letting disgraced blue-chip quarterback Nico Iamaleava run all over them in the second half and, when the offense had a short field and a chance to tie or win the game in the final minutes, failed to seize the moment, Drew Allar overshooting a kinda-sorta-open Luke Reynolds at the goal line before running a doomed fourth-down jet sweep option that, if this does wind up being the end for Franklin, just might wind up as being known as the beginning of that end.

Still, because Franklin clings to his timeouts like a toddler to his blankie, the Nittany Lions were in position to get one more possession. Even then, though, they simply weren’t ready, letting UCLA punter Will Karoll salt away precious seconds before retreating out of the back of the end zone for a safety, a play the Penn State specialty units hadn’t seen since … uh, last week.

So yeah, the Lions had chances to win this one, just as they had last week. But the level of competition and the stakes of the loss could not be more different. A loss to a veteran, talented, well-run Oregon team, even at home, can be forgiven. This one, no matter that it was a trap game or that it was the one week the Bruins decided to play inspired football or that the Lions suffered a Monday practice injury to the one player that might have had a shot at successfully spying Iamaleava, cannot. It is a humiliating defeat that, whether it is the worst loss of the Franklin era or the second-worst or the third-worst, is one that merits a long and pointed look at the Emperor’s blue-and-white wardrobe.

Did the Lions lose this one because they simply hadn’t prepared enough? That’s on Franklin.

Did they lose because they made too many avoidable mistakes? That’s on Franklin.

Did they lose because they simply aren’t the team that they were supposed to be?

That’s on Franklin … but also on the rest of us, too.

The Nittany Lions were a very good team in 2024 but they lost their biggest game in the regular season, lost in the Big Ten championship game, won two very favorable playoff matchups and lost to a very evenly matched Notre Dame opponent in the semifinal. They lost their most dynamic offensive and defensive players from that team as well as a few other key starters but returned most of that squad. But to expect to have solved all of their issues with one more offseason and a couple new wide receivers was probably optimistic, and to expect Jim Knowles to work schematic miracles with a group that is not strong enough along the front four to avoid getting gashed in the run game and evidently has forgotten how to tackle now seems to have been, too.

The first three opponents were weak enough that it was hard to get a true read on this team, though the red flags were in retrospect basically right on the money. A loss to an opponent like UCLA, and the way the Lions lost, changes the tenor of the season, from “OK, we can still probably make the playoff even with a loss to Ohio State” to “Does Franklin survive the New Year?”

We sensed this was not an elite team, and the Lions, valiantly though they fought, pretty much proved that last week. But until a team that probably won’t even make a bowl went up and down the field on Knowles’ defense, we thought this was still a good team. Now, that’s up in the air. The dream of a natty is over. Blood is in the water. And the sharks will be a lot bigger and meaner than even the most motivated version of UCLA.