Penn State football is a knotted and tangled rope tied at each end to an anchor sinking to the bottom of two very different oceans.
One ocean is made of realities, unavoidable truths that weigh the program down. This anchor wasn’t set to keep a boat close to shore in safe harbor, it was tossed into an ocean of sharks with the intention of dragging a body to the murky floor below.
Smaller rosters, limited talent and nearly no depth on a roster that will erode as the season moves along. New challenges climbing on the backs of old ones.
The anchor in the other ocean has only just begun to sink. Dirty water filled with growing frustrations, anger and the realization that a storybook ending may not be for Penn State this year. It’s like that feeling you get in a dream as an unseen threat is closing in on you. No matter how hard you fight or how fast you run, the distance is closing and the feeling of helplessness only grows.
It’s the kind of frustration that has a star quarterback yelling at his offensive coordinator and players not really having a concrete answer to what they can do about any of their issues. There are no easy solutions to problems that are half their fault and half a reality they have to navigate. It’s college football’s very own maze runners.
Perhaps Penn State’s biggest public downfall this season has been the fact that so much about Penn State football feels familiar. The crowds are large, the fans are passionate, the uniforms even went back to the no-name versions for a game. Penn State is still Penn State even if the product lacks the kind of national relevance that fans have come to expect over the years. A 4-0 open to the season was a red herring suggesting that success may not be far away. If Penn State had started at (a very possible) 2-2, the fall from the world of the undefeated may have been a little softer.
But with only four regular season games remaining on the schedule those feelings of grandeur are long gone, replaced with a perception that there has been no progress made.
That’s why, for as familiar as Penn State football seems, it is a hollow shell of what it was and what it will almost certainly be again in the near future. Penn State is playing football, but the purpose of the season feels like more of an investment for the future than any attempt to achieve a specific goal. James Franklin’s mantra of “one week seasons” has as much to do with personal and team focus as a hope to put the blinders on a roster facing a season that could drag on into the cold of December without much relief.
There is still an undeniable truth — Penn State has improved since the season began. Even if the Nittany Lions’ best overall game may have come against UCF, Penn State is a better team than it was when James Franklin got here. Although the signs of improvement are less obvious to come by.
And that speaks to something. That Penn State has had to come a long way to get where it is.
No matter how below average the offensive line might be, it’s unlikely that it’s because offensive line coach Herb Hand is bad at his job. It’s improbable that after years of success he simply turned out to be a bust thanks to an offensive line that had to fill its ranks with defensive players to have enough depth.
It stands to reason that behind the fences at the Lasch Building practice fields that this line – which is for better or worse the personification of the program at large – started at the most basic of square ones and has been able to get to this point only through the work of Hand.
Apply that logic to the majority of the roster with varying levels of success and you end where Penn State stands at 4-4. it’s a team that is better and not much more.
When you consider what Franklin and his staff did at Vanderbilt, it isn’t hard to conclude that no matter how young or imperfect the staff might be, that they found a way to succeed in the nation’s toughest football conference. And even with a full complement of players and improved recruiting they could only make so much progress in so little time.
Those challenges only got harder when they came to Penn State. And even if this season was in Year 3 of a Bill O’Brien tenure, it’s hard to imagine that he would have succeeded at a level that would have led to a drastically different outcome. Maybe Christian Hackenberg would look better, maybe the plays would have been called differently, but the underlying issue, the underlying obstacle is beyond something you can simply coach.
So yes, Penn State has gotten better.
The truth is though, “better” just might not be good enough to win this year.
And that’s the reality fans may have to face as the season hits its final stages. Penn State’s improvement has gotten the Nittany Lions to the point that they aren’t getting blown out every week. Making games competitive is the victory this season.
It’s a difficult pill to swallow, but it isn’t as though the challenges of this season were ever anything but foreseeable. This season was always going to be the low point in the curve. The only unknown was how low it would be. Considering that Penn State won two games in the final minutes, 4-4 sounds a lot higher up the curve than 2-6.
Could Penn State be better than it is right now, even with sanctions? Certainly. But what team couldn’t improve from its current status? What team wouldn’t like a few play calls back or a chance to catch a pass that was dropped? The fact of the matter is Penn State is playing short handed and only has a few options of which hands to play. There isn’t a scheme in the game or a route for a receiver to run that Penn State hasn’t contemplated. Ultimately if there was an answer out there somewhere, this team simply couldn’t pull it off on a consistent basis. Penn State’s problems go beyond a refusal to do X when the coaches are trying Y.
If anything, the fact that Penn State’s most effective play involves throwing the ball parallel to the line of scrimmage is a sign that there is a long way to go. Or the fact that an open punting competition is between two punters. Or that after weeks of calling for Akeel Lynch the pass protection his past two coaches have said needed to improve led to a sack on a game’s final play.
And so here Penn State sits only a handful of games away from either a noteworthy bowl game or another cold long winter in Happy Valley. The Nittany Lions have made a hypothetical living out of exceeding expectations, so nothing is off the table yet.
But Penn State might just be the team everyone said it would be — a hobbled program facing its steepest odds yet, just looking to make it to the other end of the season and brighter days ahead.
So even at 4-4, good calls, bad calls, dropped passes and botched reviews, the biggest victory of all might just be the fact that a .500 record could have been better.
