Sunday Column: October Should – finally – Show Us Who These Nittany Lions Really Are

The season starts on Saturday.

Yes, I know five Penn State games have already been played this season. I watched them all and have decent memories of doing so. Like you, I watched Nick Singleton explode into the national consciousness, Manny Diaz smother out-matched offenses with guile and aggression, and Sean Clifford … do what Sean Clifford does. I watched a team of Nittany Lions that looked, at times, very much like the .500ish group of the last two years and, at others, like a legitimate conference contender.

All of that was prelude. The only way that any of those games would have truly mattered is if Penn State had lost any of them. But they did not, so that they wiped out Auburn by more than most would have anticipated and subdued Central Michigan and Northwestern by a lot less than anticipated (not even Vegas can adequately predict which version of this team will show up on any given week), means the same as if they had defeated all five opponents 42-0 or 7-3.

Now the Nittany Lions enter the meat of the schedule, the three-game stretch (at Michigan, home against Minnesota and Ohio State) that will determine what sort of season 2022 will be for this team and, truly, what direction the program is moving in. And the exciting and terrifying part for Penn State fans is that the first five weeks have given us a very unclear picture of what sort of team will show up in any of these next three weeks.

In some areas, the Nittany Lions have been better than expected. The offensive line has been solid in pass protection (albeit against defensive fronts that in no way resemble what they’ll see the next three weeks) and, if not consistently dominant, able to help Penn State’s dynamic young backs revitalize the run game. Penn State is fifth in the conference with 192.6 yards per game on the ground, and that balance in the offense and the big-play potential Singleton has brought to the group should help the passing game going forward. The run game has helped the red-zone offense, one of the worst recurring hairballs for this team since 2020, become a strength; Penn State is 19-of-20 so far, with 16 of those scores resulting in six.

On defense, the Nittany Lions lost their best pass rusher, one of the best safeties in program history, and three linebackers from last year’s solid group … and might have actually gotten better. Diaz deserves massive credit for getting this group to grasp his defense quickly and for adjusting to whatever changes opponents have thrown at him; the Nittany Lions have allowed 37 second-half points all season, just 16 of them since the opener at Purdue. Yes, they’re giving up some big plays, but they’ve allowed just six touchdowns in 15 opponent red-zone visits, and have helped the team to a plus-six turnover margin.

Barney Amor has been terrific as a first-year punter, holding opponents to 1.3 yards per return and pinning 14 of 23 punts inside the 20 against just one touchback.

On the other hand, there are some areas that have consistently hampered this team against the mostly inferior competition they’ve faced to date and threaten to seriously hinder them against the gauntlet they face this month.

The Nittany Lions have converted just over a third of their third-down tries, ranking 12^th in the Big Ten, and now face Michigan (30.4%), Minnesota (17.9%) and Ohio State (27.1%) defenses that all rank in the top half of third-down conversions allowed (hard swallowing noise). Ball security was not an issue until last week’s monsoon against Northwestern and likely won’t be going forward, but you wonder if those fumbles won’t linger in the minds of Penn State’s inexperienced ballcarriers. The wide receivers, not needed nearly as much because of the emergence of the run game, have been excellent at times and invisible at others. As good as the Nittany Lions defensive backs have been at breaking up passes, they’ve also missed a disturbing number of tackles, leading to some of those aforementioned chunk plays. And the field-goal and even extra-point kicking has ranged from competent to outright alarming.

After Auburn, it seemed like a corner had been turned, and then the Central Michigan and Northwestern games, perfect opportunities to build on that momentum and spend leisurely second halves allowing reserves (the tall, lanky, quarterback types, perhaps?) to pick up sustained chunks of reps, resulted in rarely-in-doubt-but-largely-unsatisfying wins. Again, the margins mean little in the larger context, but the one step forward, one step back nature of those games had enough echoes of the last two seasons to bring on some understandable PTSD for Penn State fans. With every off-platform throw from Clifford that sails long, there’s that “Here we go again” feeling, even if Clifford had completed five straight tosses prior to that. The extra points that bang off the upright in a game you don’t need them plants an uneasy feeling that they might return late in the day in Ann Arbor, when you do.

The Nittany Lions have made enough progress in some key areas, those mentioned above and others, and improved enough of their longstanding weaknesses, to the point that you can easily envision them navigating this tough three-game stretch at 2-1 or, should the winds blow favorably, maybe even 3-0. They’ve also left enough meat on the bone in most of their first five games that a 1-2 or even an 0-3 mark in those games is quite conceivable. Neither the optimist-iest of optimistic Penn State fans nor the most skeptical of the pessimists are likely to place large bets at this point, given what we’ve seen. All three weeks should be compelling, and, no matter the outcomes, they should teach us a lot more about this team than the five games to date.