Sunday Column: Sleepy Giants or Pretenders in Giant’s Clothing? Either Way, Penn State Continuing to Cruise

There are a couple of ways to view Penn State’s 30-13 defeat of Illinois:

1. The Nittany Lions have, both gradually and suddenly, evolved into an Ohio State-Georgia-Michigan-What-Bama-Used-to-Be type of program, the sort that has enough talent and depth that it needs only to hold serve for the first half or even the first three quarters before inferior opponents, even those who have been playing smart and tough football, inevitably succumb to that talent.
2. Penn State has some major issues to sort out and was fortunate that the Illinois offense insisted on giving away the football.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, the contrast between this game and the last time the two teams met, that nine-overtime clusterbleep of a game in 2021, was stark. The talent gap between these teams, quite narrow two years ago, has widened considerably even when you consider the best player on the field was Illini defensive tackle Jer’Zhan Newton. The Nittany Lions totaled 383 yards of offense, which was 153 more than they mustered against this opponent two years ago. They were turnover-free for the third straight week while Illinois, was, um, slightly less protective of the football.

And yet, there were still moments where you wondered exactly how far Penn State has come: The offense’s first three drives, two of which began in plus territory thanks to the ballhawking defense, netted only six points. There was a 2^nd and 2 in the third quarter that became a punt. The wunderkind, Drew Allar, who had been borderline surgical through the first two weeks, did not look like the moment was too big for him but neither was he anywhere close to sharp, throwing behind or just out of the reach of several receivers, who didn’t help by dropping some imperfect but wholly catchable balls. His offensive line, which had been competent if not dominant in two games at home, struggled to get much push for its running backs and committed a few costly penalties, casting a longer and darker shadow over the idea that this would be the year the big fellas finally put it all together.

Added up, these moments mean there will be lots of teaching for the coaches to do during the next week of practice as Penn State preps for another defensive-minded opponent, Iowa. If you were looking hard at the big picture, as most Penn State fans cannot help but doing, there were as many legitimate concerns coming out of this game as there had been through the first two weeks combined.

But if you took two steps back and limited your view to the little picture that was this (nearly four-hour!) game, you saw Allar, once again, spending most of the final quarter on the sideline with a comfortable lead. You saw a defense that not only came up with four picks and a fumble recovery (and could have easily had two or three more), but also held slippery quarterback Luke Altmeyer to a grand total of 6 yards rushing on 4 attempts, a number helped considerably by three sacks. Illinois had only 62 yards rushing and the bulk of its 292 passing came in the fourth quarter as backup John Paddock played against a second-team defense. The special teams got another steady performance from kicker Alex Felkins and some spark from returners Kaden Saunders and Nick Singleton.

For the third straight week, Penn State delivered a performance that even its harshest critics would admit was nowhere near its capabilities, and for the third straight week was never in any real danger of losing the game. The Nittany Lions have outscored those three opponents by a total of 66-14 after halftime, which lends more than a little credence to the idea that not only do you need to play a four-quarter game to beat this team but that you probably need to have the same type of depth and talent.

Illinois didn’t. West Virginia and Delaware didn’t. Of the nine teams remaining on the schedule, only two do. If it seems silly that the theme of the season keeps circling back to those two games, especially when Penn State has so far rarely played the type of polished football it will need in those games, think of the alternative: A not-so-faraway universe in which Penn State is spending those other nine Saturdays of the season in dogfights, or even nine-overtime games in which there is an invisible wall on the goal line.

Maybe the Nittany Lions are still closer to Illinois and Iowa than they are to Ohio State and Michigan. We’ll find out for sure in a few weeks. For now, watching a team find ways to win comfortably without looking truly comfortable will have to be enough.