Sunday Column: Will The Real Penn State Please Stand Up?

It has been difficult these past two autumns to know exactly which Penn State team you are watching at any given moment.

Is it the discombobulated, self-destructive group that went 0-5 to start 2020 and has dropped four of five in 2021? Or the explosive, gritty squad that won four straight to end last season and emerged triumphant from early-season heavyweight bouts against Wisconsin and Auburn? Is it overachieving? Is it underachieving? Is it all of those teams at once, or none of them at all?

I suppose it depends upon your perspective, whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty type of person, whether you believe that talent or recruiting rankings should set the expectation bar or if you think that winning football is more about teamwork and desire and cohesion.

No matter what kind of team you thought Penn State was or what you thought it was supposed to be, though, Saturday’s loss to Michigan had to be five kinds of painful. A legitimate chance to beat a top-10 opponent, a hated rival and an easy-to-hate coach, plus the opportunity to add a signature win to a season that still didn’t have one and keep hopes alive for a big bowl. And, somehow, even after all the missed opportunities and sacks and footballs on the ground, it was in the Nittany Lions’ hands late in the fourth quarter.

And then it wasn’t. Just as in many of the losses during the past 13 months, and several in James Franklin’s previous six seasons at Penn State, the Nittany Lions came up small in big situations after doing some impressive work to get into those situations in the first place.

Once again, exactly why they came up small depends somewhat on your perspective: Was the fourth-and-the-season pass over Cam Sullivan-Brown’s head a bad throw or read by Sean Clifford, or a bad play design and call for the situation by Mike Yurcich? Was the fake field-goal toss to Jordan Stout an example of botched execution or a bad spot to roll the dice in a game in which three points wound up being pretty important?

Whatever your answers to those questions, or others — why is Penn State’s offensive line so outmatched? Why did the defense blitz on Erick All’s game-clinching touchdown? — might be, the buck eventually stops at Franklin. He has pressed a lot of the right buttons and won a lot of games in these past eight years, but the misfires on Saturday were a few more examples of a disconnect, an inability of his team to maximize its capabilities when it matters most, that keeps popping up at inopportune moments.

The best teams rarely beat themselves, and find ways to get it done when the game is on the line. Too many of Franklin’s teams have showed the worst versions of themselves in those key moments. If you show an opponent your best and get beat anyway, it’s one thing. But the Michigan loss, and the Illinois loss, or Indiana last year, or — OK, you get it — were all games that Penn State had reasonable control of before that disconnect, that failure to get the coaches and the players on the same page, caused enough havoc to give the opponents — some of them more talented, some of them less — an opening.

Part of it can be explained simply by the dual turnstiles of players and coaches. Between the transfer portal and a steady stream of conventional and unconventional injuries, Penn State has seen significant turnover in its starting lineup over the last two seasons. And at the same time, Franklin’s staff, not that long ago one of the most stable in college football, has had a near complete turnover as well. Only Brent Pry and Terry Smith have been with Franklin for more than the last four seasons. Though the recruiting has held up wonderfully over that stretch, that lack of familiarity between player and player, player and coach, or even coach and coach has seemingly made it difficult for Penn State to establish a true identity.

Then again, maybe that identity stuff is overblown. If a coach can win one week 10-7 and run the ball 70 times and win the next week 42-41 by throwing for 500 yards, what does it matter? He’ll take both of those wins with equal measure and dive back into the film either way. But it does bring us back to the original question of who are these Nittany Lions? Are they knocking on the door of elite status, in need of just a few dominant players — like, say, top-75 recruits at running back and quarterback? — to open that door? Or have they already reached this coach’s ceiling, and the infusion of five-star talent would only serve to make the same disconnected results even more frustrating?

Even if it had won Saturday, Penn State had already left too much meat on the bone this fall for this to be considered a great season, and these larger questions would still be largely unanswered. It was the particular way it lost the game against a strong but ripe-for-the-picking opponent, though, that was all too familiar, and a strong hint that, whatever Franklin’s ceiling might be, he continues to struggle to match it with the ceiling of whatever team he has on the field at that particular moment.