Sunday Column: ‘Is This College Football Hell?’ ‘No, it’s Iowa.’
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EXT. MIDWESTERN FARM/KINNICK STADIUM – NIGHT
RED GRANGE (ghost) walks out of cornfield, stumbles into Kinnick Stadium, watches Penn State and Iowa live…because streaming doesn’t exist in the afterlife. As the clock strikes zero, Grange approaches another legend.
GRANGE
Is this college football hell?
KIRK FERENTZ (shrugging)
It’s Iowa.
Annnd scene…
All kinds of unpredictable stuff happens every week all over the country in college football. Kinnick Stadium at night is a different animal. In one sense, one of the nation’s loudest environments against a top-10 defense is a nightmare venue for a team starting a redshirt freshman quarterback. In another sense, if you’re gonna bounce back from one of the most gut-punching weeks—hell, months—in program history, why not go for broke and play like you have nothing to lose against a team that has made a living off of beating more talented teams with a lot to lose?
The Nittany Lions, with Terry Smith and Ethan Grunkemeyer (and, uhhhhh, Jaxon Smolik) leading the way rather than James Franklin and Drew Allar, played mostly like they had nothing to lose in Saturday’s 25-24 loss to the Hawkeyes, using turnovers and the churning legs of Kaytron Allen to hang around until the final minutes, when Grunkemeyer’s inexperience and Andy Kotelnicki’s, um, familiar habits stalled the offense.
Penn State was in great shape to steal a win midway through the third, when it led 21-10 after Allen’s touchdown run. But the two issues that have exposed what was supposed to be another rock-solid defense all season—third-down failures and inability to corral running quarterbacks—came together on a crucial 3rd-and-3 the next series, when Iowa quarterback Mark Gronowski went up the middle for 38 yards to set up his own 4-yard touchdown run.
After the Nittany Lions made an understandable call given the tenor of the evening but questionable given time, score, and location on the field and yet another Kotelnicki trick play was shut down on 4th-and-1, Iowa picked up 21 yards on the next play and shortly after converted a field goal. Some clutch third-down play by Grunkemeyer got the Lions in the red zone but Trebor Pena dropped a first-down pass in the end zone, the drive stalled and Penn State had to settle for three when six might have clinched the game.
Smith has to be proud of and encouraged by the fire his team showed on Saturday, which burned far hotter than anything the Lions had displayed since the backbreaking loss to Oregon. But that kind of juice, a heady cocktail of pride and frustration, can only be produced in limited amounts, and the rest of the season looks like it’s going to be a grind, simply because of the issues that got the team to this point, plus the added issue of a young quarterback who doesn’t have the trust of an offensive coordinator who hasn’t earned a lot of trust himself this fall.
Sure, guys have stuff to play for—Allen, Zakee Wheatley (who was tremendous Saturday), Dani Dennis-Sutton and Zane Durant (who were both disturbingly quiet) and Nick Singleton (just … never mind) are all trying to put more good plays on tape for NFL scouts. Grunkemeyer and Smolik, who performed a dizzying game of musical chairs at QB, are trying to get reps and confidence and understand what opposing defenses are doing (Iowa DC Phil Parker gave them a masterclass on Saturday). The rest of the Lions are trying to improve their stock for the 2026 version of Penn State … or another program, as the transfer portal tends to be even more active for teams going through coaching transitions.
It’s not an ideal spot to be in when you’re in the middle of a challenging Big Ten slate, which continues in Columbus against, oh, the No. 1 team in the country after a bye week. The nagging question that, to Smith’s great credit, his players seemed to have forgotten about this week and Penn State fans likely only remembered once the zeroes hit the scoreboard, is:
Do results even matter at this point?
Penn State will be an attractive coaching destination—despite what some of the hot-take artists who need capital C CONTENT will tell you—whether it wins another game or not in 2025. It has its considerable football tradition to thank for much of that, and Franklin and all the work he did to update the facilities and resources for the rest. But it doesn’t really need to be that competitive in the remainder of this stunning season to attract its next boss or keep its considerable fan base engaged, which is wild when you consider that less than a month ago a playoff berth and national title both seemed well within reach.
It was encouraging to see Smith instill some needed oomph into this team and then continue it with some aggressive strategy and sideline energy throughout the game, just as it was good to see Kotelnicki install a few new wrinkles and lean even harder on Allen, who is about the only consistent bright spot on offense right now. But when you consider that there’s a good chance neither coach—and perhaps very few of the players—will even be in State College six months from now, it’s difficult to get too excited, or too disappointed, about the numbers on the scoreboard or even how the team looks getting there.
Would it be fun to spoil another team’s season, or at least sully it? Absolutely, and the Lions will have a chance to do that in Columbus and again when upstart Indiana visits Beaver Stadium.
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