Sunday Column: Thumping of Minnesota Shows Nittany Lions Have Learned to Bounce Back, But Just How High Remains To Be Seen

If last week’s game was a visit to the dental surgeon and next Saturday’s game a trip to the proctologist, Penn State’s Homecoming game against Minnesota was a metaphorical flu shot.

Some risk involved, if only a sore arm, but a picnic by comparison to the weeks surrounding it. And perhaps a chance to serve some benefit down the road.

Before one of the larger Beaver Stadium crowds in recent memory, the Nittany Lions broke open what had first appeared to be a close if not fantastically competitive game with an avalanche of second-half touchdowns. The end result meant nothing and it meant everything.

Allow me to elaborate.

It meant nothing in the sense that we already knew Penn State could do this — smack around a team with lesser talent. It had done so five previous times this season. What we hadn’t and still haven’t seen was the Nittany Lions take their game to another level, and hold their own against a team with as much or more talent. We weren’t going to see that this week, even if Minnesota has played some solid football both this season and in recent years, especially with Tanner Morgan still sidelined with a concussion.

It meant everything in the sense that Penn State proved — at least for one more week — that this year was not going to be a head-scratching replica of 2020 and 2021, when the Nittany Lions let one bad loss snowball into long strings of them, when they played to the level of their opponents in the worst sense each week and left massive cuts of meat on the bone. There’s no shame in losing at Michigan (well, there’s a little shame in losing 41-17) or at home to Ohio State. Falling to a scrappy but flawed Minnesota team despite enjoying a massive home-field advantage would have shaken the foundations of a program that has already seen some paint flaking off and a few shingles missing.

This is not to say that the Nittany Lions solved all of their problems on Saturday night, or blossomed into some monstrous new peak version of themselves that was lingering beneath the surface this whole time. They went six-and-out to start the game, and then turned it over on the third possession. They seemed ready to break the game open in the second quarter, then let the Gophers seize a ton of momentum with a 9-play, 90-yard touchdown drive that made it a one-score game right before half.

But they did a few of the things they hadn’t last week in Ann Arbor or, really, since the blowout of Auburn that now feels like it was years ago. They not only found but consistently exploited a soft spot in a good Minnesota defense—an inability to cover the tight end. They established what passed for a consistent running game. Yes, Gopher RB extraordinare Mohamed Ibrahim got his 100 yards, but he needed 30 carries to get them, and the defense did a nice job of mixing blitzes or getting home without them to flummox backup QB-turned-starter Athan Kaliakmanis.

Now, there is a very good chance that none of these things will be enough to save them from another humbling defeat, or even allow them to make things competitive, when the Buckeyes roll into town next week. But the fact that the Nittany Lions did to the Gophers just about what the Wolverines did to them, only one week after the Wolverines did it to them, says a good bit about the resilience of the people in the program.

The other piece of this is that, as with all White Out games, there were a significant number of prospects in the building. The last two decades have taught us that most of the players who have come through the program were in awe of such an atmosphere and many cited those visits as key reasons why they chose Penn State. There are probably just as many top prospects who were impressed by those atmospheres but did not choose Penn State because the Nittany Lions happened to come up short on one of those nights.

Taking down an unranked Big Ten opponent before a noisy throng of white might not have been enough for Penn State to win the hearts of any of the stud high-schoolers in the building, but it probably didn’t hurt. But then, getting talent in the building and then onto the roster has rarely been the problem for James Franklin; molding that talent into well-functioning units that can dominate lesser teams and compete with the best has. That Penn State played close to what it should be capable of on Saturday meant something, probably more than the final score.

It would mean a lot more, of course, if they can do it next week, or the proctologist analogy might not seem so much of a reach.