Sunday Column: The Nightmare May Be Closer to the Beginning than to its End

Welcome to rock bottom. 

Or at least whatever rock bottom means until next week.

Penn State did what no other Penn State team had ever done on Saturday, falling to 0-5 on the season with a lopsided loss to a solid but unspectacular Iowa side and leaving little evidence that the first of those two numbers is likely to change anytime soon.

This isn’t a downward spiral for the Nittany Lions; it is a free fall. It can take years of work to build a program to the point where it can compete for conference championships and call itself one of the nation’s 10 best. James Franklin did that. And it can take only a matter of weeks to see that foothold he and his staff and his players had worked so hard to earn to fall away.

It is a credit to Franklin and Bill O’Brien and Joe Paterno that you have to canvas the far corners of your memory to recall the last time Penn State had a season like this. But then you realize none of those seasons — at least as it currently stands — really came close to this one. Yes, the 2004 offense was bad, and the 2003 offense and defense were bad, and 2000 was a shock to the system after the Nittany Lions had spent so much of the previous season in the national championship conversation.

But in all of those seasons, there were at least reasons for optimism, even if you had to squint to see them. Those teams had major and minor flaws on the field and the sideline but they played hard and, in all but a few of the losses, were at least competitive. The players who would become the leaders of the far more successful 2002 and 2005 squads learned from those losses and used them as motivation.

This is where the coughing elephant in the room needs to be mentioned. None of those other Penn State teams had to play in empty stadiums, hold team meetings via Zoom or hold split practices. Those things matter, even if every team that has beaten Penn State has faced some version of the same. So does the fact that the very best players on this team — Micah Parsons, Journey Brown, Noah Cain, Pat Freiermuth — have not been and/or will not be available.

That said, it is difficult to imagine the results would be drastically different if those stars were in the lineup, or if the team had a normal offseason to break in its four new assistant coaches and a new offense. Brown and Cain would find yards hard to come by behind an offensive line that was manhandled by the Hawkeyes on Saturday and hasn’t been much better all year. Freiermuth would still have trouble grabbing inaccurate passes, or even getting targets, from either of the team’s two struggling quarterbacks. Parsons would get his share of tackles and sacks, sure, but he can’t play safety and defensive tackle while he’s playing linebacker.

It should also be noted that, of those four players, only Cain stood to return in 2021 anyway. The most depressing part about watching Penn State this season isn’t how awful the quality of football has been, it’s looking at the current group of players and wondering exactly how it’s going to be better next season. Right now, the youngest Nittany Lions are either having to play before they’re really ready or unable to push underperforming veterans out of the starting lineup. And the lack of energy and mental discipline has been evident at every position and from the upperclassmen on down. 

If you’re in an especially charitable mood, you might be able to forgive the Nittany Lions, given what little they have left to play for, the aforementioned lack of fans to feed off of and everything that’s going on in the world outside of football, for going through the motions at this point in the season from hell. The fans aren’t the only ones who want the calendar to turn to 2021. But each snap that they give less than maximum effort will make it that much harder for them to flip the switch and find the answers next year, no matter which recruits are walking through the door. And expectations should be held in check for the 2021 recruiting class, currently ranked 24th per the 247Sports Composite.

Franklin has earned the right to pull the Nittany Lions out of this mess for the simple reason that at no point in any of his first six seasons at Penn State did his team look like this. Sure, there was some meat left on the bone on the field and on the recruiting trail in most of those seasons, but he kept the team competitive, even as stars and assistant coaches came and went. That the program has gone from that level — not the level of Ohio State, but a lot closer to Ohio State than anyone else in the league — to a level that would make even Rutgers fans wrinkle their noses, almost overnight, is stunning to anyone who has even casually followed this team.

At least until you watch this team play. It looks like an 0-5 team. It talks like an 0-5 team. Really, it looks like a team that’s staring 0-9 in the face and doesn’t know what to do to prevent it. Paterno used to famously say you get better or you get worse but you don’t stay the same. It’s a lot easier to move in the latter direction than the former.

Franklin made a name for himself by turning around Vanderbilt’s perennially impotent program. Until a few weeks ago, no one would have thought he would be faced with the same sort of rebuilding project at Penn State. But the five losses in this season, just like the 56 wins in the six seasons before them, have happened on his watch. Maybe this season is an outlier. Find the right quarterback, shore up the lines, allow some young leaders to develop, and things could turn around quickly. The possibility that it isn’t, though, and that more troubles lie ahead, is real, and gets more real each time rock bottom hits a new low.