Sunday Column: Understandably This Time, Lions Once Again Fail To Unseat Conference Kings — But A Full Reset Looms On The Horizon

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The Penn State team that took the field in Columbus on Saturday was a very different team than the last one that had played Ohio State a year ago. It was also a very different team than the one that had started this season.

After a relatively even first half, though, the Buckeyes made it look like the same old predictable horror movie that has played out on so many Fall afternoons.

With an interim head coach and what increasingly appears to be an interim quarterback, Penn State fought bravely against the nation’s No. 1 team, but in the process displayed that it was not at all equipped to handle it for four quarters and really wasn’t even if Drew Allar, Tony Rojas and (gulp) James Franklin had been on the field and sideline, either.

I got a text early in the fourth quarter, shortly after the Nittany Lions had amassed one (1) yard of offense on their first three-plus possessions of the half, that read “Looks like there are more problems than Franklin,” and while that statement was true indeed and had been even before the start of what is now a five-game losing streak, the biggest problems had been born under Franklin’s watch.

To name a few:

•A lack of talent and depth on the defensive line, which allowed Julian Sayin to drop bombs to his stud wide receivers as they cruised by Penn State’s DBs without much, if any, fear of pressure

•A lack of talent and depth at linebacker, which allowed the Buckeyes’ usually stodgy run game to pile up first downs in both halves

•An offensive line that, for roughly the 67th time this century, was no match for a talented Ohio State front, which made it a long afternoon for Ethan Grunkemeyer and eventually shut down a running game that had gotten off to a promising start

Sensing a theme here?

Turns out that moving a key coach from one sideline to the other, or saying farewell to your 12-year head coach, doesn’t matter that much if there is still a major disparity between your Xs and the other guy’s Os. Penn State is, as everyone reading this column knows, kinda going through it right now, and the problem with playing for pride is that if you’re in that position, a lot of things have gone wrong, and pride is hardly ever enough on its own to fix those things.

It’s even more difficult to fix all of your recurring issues against a defending national champion that doesn’t appear to have lost much off its fastball. The Buckeyes, who have made it a habit of letting opponents hang around early before hitting the nitro in the second half, weathered a turnover in their own red zone that led to a Penn State touchdown, then simply exerted their will on the Nittany Lions offensively and defensively, as they’ve done so many times to the Lions and pretty much everyone else in the Big Ten during the last two decades.

Much as they did two weeks earlier at Iowa, the Nittany Lions played as though they had nothing to lose, utilizing some aggressive offensive tempo late in the first half that seemed to have backfired until Chaz Coleman recovered a CJ Donaldson fumble inside the Buckeye 20. Coming off a bye week, the Lions had a few new interesting, and effective, wrinkles, including a seven-lineman, two-tight end look that helped punch in their second touchdown.

Eventually, though, talent wins out, and the key difference between Ohio State’s talent advantage over the Nittany Lions and the advantage Penn State had over opponents like UCLA and Northwestern is that the Buckeyes know who they are, do the big things and the little things well, and have a built-in confidence that allows them to shrug off a bad series or even a bad half. It’s a winning culture that shows up not just on a weekly basis but especially when they get punched in the mouth. Under Franklin, the Nittany Lions did the first half of that equation fairly well but usually failed miserably at the second part.

So how do they flip the script on the Bullies of the Big Ten? Well, hard as it is to believe after seeing the result on Saturday, the second half in particular, Penn State is as close to doing so now as it has been in years, simply because it now has the opportunity to change its culture and style of play when it names its next full-time leader of the program. The Lions could try to go the Michigan route, stocking up on beastly linemen and building a power running game to wear down and out-tough the Buckeyes. They could try to do what Franklin did, which was emulate the Ohio State program itself in terms of roster- and resource-building. They could use more of a pro-style approach, as they did in the fleeting Bill O’Brien years.

Or maybe they just do what has been the building block for Ryan Day and Nick Saban and Kirby Smart and recruit their bleeping faces off.

Whoever the new guy is and whatever strategy he employs, he’ll have some time to figure it out—Ohio State rotates off the Lions’ schedule until 2028. By that point, the new coach will have had two and a half years to recruit, establish his schemes and build the sort of winning culture that exists in Columbus and very few other places in a college football landscape that continues to shift at hyperspeed. And while the very nature of that landscape means it’s no guarantee that Ohio State will still be the same kind of team in 2028, it’s just as likely that it will continue to be the type of program that lays all of its opponents’ warts bare for the world to see, as it did again to Penn State on Saturday in the Shoe.

Franklin was never able to remove all of those warts or find the cracks in Day’s sharp-eyebrowed armor. His successor will be provided at least a few chances to do both, but Saturday once again showed how much work he’ll have ahead of him.