Sunday Column: Nittany Lions Run Over Wolverines with ‘Fresh’ Legs and Drum Up Some Hope

Full disclosure: After (rightly, and easily) taking Penn State to task in each of the previous five columns for many things, most of them relating to simply bad, bad football, I came into Saturday planning to use this space to highlight some of the positives for the Nittany Lions as it pertained to both this week’s game and, more importantly, to the future. I had planned to start (and likely finish) with some of the team’s younger players.

The kids made that easy to do.

Yes, Penn State got some important plays from its few remaining veterans during its takedown of hated Michigan — some big third-down grabs from Jahan Dotson, a big fourth-down stop by Ellis Brooks (and, asinine rules be damned, an outstanding heads-up play to help deliver what should have been a game-ending sack and fumble recovery from Shaka Toney) and, all credit where it’s due, a steady, mistake-free game from Sean Clifford, who had been neither of those things since 2019.

But the handprints of Penn State’s last two recruiting classes were all over this one, and right from the start. Theo Johnson and Keyvone Lee made their first starts of the season and combined with wide receiver Parker Washington to mark the first time in the program’s illustrious football history that true freshmen had started at tight end, running back and wide receiver in the same game.

Now, did that statistic have more to do with the injuries to Noah Cain and Pat Freiermuth and the absence of Devyn Ford than anything Lee or Johnson did? Absolutely. That’s football. And, for Penn State, that’s 2020. But though the rookies might have earned those opportunities by default, they made the most of them. Lee churned out 134 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries, 44 of them on the decisive touchdown drive and 30 more during a clock-killing march that ended in victory formation. Washington, who has been solid for most of the season, had arguably his most impactful performance, hauling in nine catches for 93 yards. Johnson did not catch a pass but was effective as a blocker as Penn State rolled up 254 yards rushing.

All of these things are good for a program that has to really look hard to find the good right now. Yes, beating Michigan in Ann Arbor will never not be fun for Penn State, no matter the circumstances, but this morning Penn State is still 1-5. Even if the Nittany Lions can build on this and scratch out a 4-5 finish, this season will go down as a disappointment at best and a massive momentum-killer in the grand scheme of things at worst.

The best way to build back that momentum, of course, is finding the players who will be the cornerstones of future and ostensibly more successful Penn State teams. The downside of terrible seasons marred by lousy injury luck is that you wind up playing more freshmen than you want to a lot sooner than you want to. The upside is, at the end of those seasons, those freshmen have tallied a lot of reps. They’ve got tape of the mistakes they’ve made to study and confidence earned from the big plays they’ve made.

Washington has a wiggle with and without the football and a toughness that would be admirable in any senior player. Johnson and redshirt freshman Brenton Strange aren’t Freiermuth, but they’re both members of a tight end group that’s been quietly building some talented depth and they both look like they could be weapons in the running game and passing game. Offensive tackle Caedan Wallace, another redshirt freshman, didn’t stand out in any major way on Saturday…which is a good thing for young linemen more often than it’s not.

Lee and classmate Caziah Holmes, who added 34 yards on 10 carries Saturday, will still look like freshmen a few times a game — a missed block here, a left turn into traffic when a right turn would have gotten five more yards there — but Saquon Barkley wasn’t really Saquon Barkley in his first year at Penn State, either. You can see the game starting to slow down for Lee and Holmes (OK, maybe Michigan’s front seven looks slow to everybody), and you can see the coaches beginning to trust them more, even if they have no other choice.

Right now, the freshmen are the heart of Penn State’s offense, which explains a lot about an 0-5 start but also makes the future very intriguing. Things are a little different on the defensive side of the ball, where there are young players who have flashed potential on more than a few occasions — Joey Porter Jr., Lance Dixon, Adisa Isaac, Hakeem Beamon — but who are, as a group, on a bumpier learning curve than their offensive counterparts at the moment. Still, the long-term effects are the same — more reps that they probably had bargained for, and more young players ahead of schedule.

The reason Penn State won on Saturday isn’t because it suddenly got more talented than it had been a week or a month ago, but because it made fewer mistakes than it had during those previous weeks. Young players made their share of those mistakes, and that share was proportionately smaller on Saturday. With every week that passes, with every game rep they see, those freshmen, redshirt freshmen and sophomores get less young football-wise, and the mistakes should continue to decrease.

The Nittany Lions dug themselves a substantial hole during the past two months, and it’s going to take continued improvement from the entire roster and the entire staff to climb all the way out of it. All this digging, though, should serve the team’s youngest players well when Penn State has more to play for and they’re the players who are leading the team — if they aren’t the players leading the team by the end of THIS season, that is.