Sunday Column: Nittany Lions’ Plan for Upset Offset by Self-Destruction

Three players trotted into the end zone with no one around them on Saturday night.

Only one of them scored a touchdown.

Penn State’s 33-24 loss to Ohio State in the Big … uh, Horseshoe was a game defined by big plays. The Buckeyes made enough of them — including a 57-yard scoop and score by defensive tackle Jerron Cage — to hold off a game bunch of Nittany Lions, who went toe-to-toe with the hosts in many ways but made more mistakes than big plays of their own.

Jesse Luketa’s jaunt into the end zone came after he picked up a harmless incomplete pass, and John Lovett’s romp was only after he had run more than a yard out-of-bounds before catching the pass. Neither counted, of course, and it was that kind of evening for the Nittany Lions, an evening of missed opportunities and almosts. Penn State forced a turnover on the first possession, the perfect start for a team looking to pull off a big upset on the road … and then gave the ball back on the very…next…play. Down three early in the final quarter, the Nittany Lions were gifted a turnover on downs when C.J. Stroud missed a wide-open Chris Olave … then gave the ball back four plays later on an ill-advised throw by Sean Clifford that was intercepted by Cameron Brown.

There are positives for Penn State to take away from this, even as the Nittany Lions slumped into the night chewing on their third straight loss. The effort, the coaching and the execution were all miles better than they had been the previous week against Illinois, which fans of the team would have hoped to see but, if they were honest, weren’t quite sure they would. Clifford, his two costly turnovers aside, looked as good as he had at any other point this season, making decisive reads and accurate throws under pressure. The offensive line was its usual hot mess in run blocking but also, as usual, held up well in pass protection. And the defense, at least for a half, appeared to have found a way to corral both dangerous running back TreVeyon Henderson and arguably the Big Ten’s best group of receivers, holding the Buckeyes to one offensive touchdown.

Of course, there is no way to corral all of them for 60 minutes, as the Nittany Lions discovered in the second half. While Penn State sustained scoring drives of 89, 75 and 75 yards via mostly small and medium chunks, Ohio State used the quick strike — 58 yards from Stroud to Jaxon Smith-Njigba to set up a field goal; a 68-yard burst from Henderson to set up his own touchdown; a 30-yard hookup from Stroud to tight end Jeremy Ruckert that set up the final field goal and iced the game.

Penn State’s offense, which might have had trouble punching it in from 2 yards out with Saquon Barkley and the entire 1994 offensive line last week, showed few such signs of ineffectiveness against an Ohio State defense that had some juice up front but ample holes to exploit downfield. The Nittany Lions rolled up 394 yards, their highest total in three games and their highest total in three years against their hated interstate rival. But because of the Lions’ mistakes, of both the forced and unforced variety, all the Buckeyes had to do late in the game was hold serve. If they didn’t look like the conference’s dominant team in a year in which the dominant team hasn’t quite yet emerged, they nonetheless managed to stay out of their own way, the estimated 42 false-start penalties they committed aside, and avoid the type of costly mistakes that Penn State couldn’t.

The Nittany Lions, who managed to hide some of their warts earlier in the year behind some explosive plays from Clifford and Jahan Dotson and some dynamic defense and then had all of their warts exposed (and a few more pop up) in the last two games, showed both their flaws and their potential in nearly equal measure on Saturday. We saw, in larger doses, what Mike Yurcich’s passing attack could be with strong quarterback play — were you watching, Drew Allar? — and that Penn State’s secondary lost none of its swagger against Olave, Smith-Njigba and Garrett Wilson, even if at times it was a bit too handsy.

At the same time, we saw a running attack that would be better referred to as a crawling attack once again provide the offense with zero balance, and a defensive line that needed perhaps one or two more healthy bodies to provide some pressure on an impressive but still raw quarterback to pull this one off.

We saw James Franklin and his staff do a superb job of preparing their team, strategically and emotionally, for this game (which of course begs the question of why they hadn’t been at all prepared for Illinois), and we saw that team pull off the majority of the game plan, only to be done in by the type of self-destruction it had danced around in the first month of the season. Only seven days earlier, the Nittany Lions hadn’t looked inconsistent so much as they looked cooked. Saturday, against the best team they’ve played this fall, they repeatedly put themselves in position to win the game.

Figuring out how to avoid repeatedly slipping out of that position will be the next step.