ATLANTA — To a certain extent a lot of this can be explained away, but not all of it.
If you want to look at Penn State’s 38-25 Peach Bowl loss to Ole Miss on Saturday through a more positive perspective, you might embrace the realities that come with the Nittany Lions operating with three interim coordinators and multiple opt-outs which weakened Penn State in a direct contrast to Ole Miss’ offensive strengths. Add a hobbled Abdul Carter to the mix and the Nittany Lions struggling to slow down an up-tempo, deep and balanced attack does not come as a huge surprise. Boiled down, Penn State’s defense was not a representative sample of what it had been all year.
So to a certain extent, Penn State headed into Saturday knowing that it had one hand at least partially tied behind its back for reasons that were not of its own doing.
If you want to look at Penn State’s loss more critically and with a less optimistic tone, then Saturday is the continuation of a growing belief that James Franklin struggles to fix what ails his team. When things are good or his team is simply too talented to lose, Franklin generally is a deft captain of the ship. When things are not good, Penn State has yet to lean on the wit of its coaching staff to overcome those issues against teams of note. It is probably unreasonable to think that you can simply coach your way past any team in spite of any weakness, but some things can still improve in spite of themselves. While it’s probably unfair to say that has never happened under Franklin’s watch, it also hasn’t been his calling card.
Take Penn State’s receivers room for example, and transfer wideout Dante Cephas.
“Everything’s an open competition every week,” Franklin said postgame after Cephas did not see a snap on Saturday. “And the depth chart reflects that. Then obviously when you’re in a bowl situation and you’ve got three weeks, there’s a lot of movement that can occur in three weeks. Part of that obviously is having Trey [Wallace] back, who we had not had for about five weeks this year.”
Franklin might be covering for some other internal reason that Cephas did not play, but taken at face value it is a damming admission to state of that room. It’s an incredible circumstance that Penn State can make it all the way to bowl preparations and have to effectively bench the team’s second-leading wide receiver because of an inability to be consistent.
In effect, all the way from this past spring to the final game of the year Penn State was unable to develop or establish a consistent receiving threat other than its two tight ends. Whatever quarterback Drew Allar’s shortcomings might be, or whatever unknown challenges might face players throughout the season, it is almost inconceivable that a program vying for a Big Ten title can fail to even partially solve an issue that was regularly and openly discussed before the season even began. Cephas not playing isn’t an indictment of Franklin for not “simply trying something else.” It’s an indictment of the program at-large that right up until the final game of the year none of its receivers had generated enough reliability, consistency or habits to reach a level where it would be inconceivable to even contemplate not playing them.
Why they couldn’t generate those things is a guessing game. Penn State’s best preseason option was KeAndre Lambert-Smith, who was plagued with consistency issues prior to this year and could only somewhat fix those things this season. Trey Wallace has long been a favorite to generate consistency but injuries — through no fault of his own — have largely rendered this season as entirely forgettable. As for his counterpart, after starting off the year on a good note and managing to established some degree of reliability, Lambert-Smith finished the year with two receptions over the final 12 quarters of the season. Everyone else showed signs here or there, but one has to assume that Penn State’s coaching staff isn’t simply neglecting to play the good players. At some point you have to take their word for it.
It also could do with the offense itself. It bears repeating that Penn State fired a coach in the middle fo the year because its offense struggled so mightily against quality opponents. If you want to be unhappy about that, be reminded that someone did in fact lose their job over it. While there might be some far-fetched belief Penn State was going to reinvent the wheel in the middle of the season, that was never going to happen. The duo of Ja’Juan Seider and Ty Howle may have added a few touches of their own, but this was Yurcich’s book and he paid for that fact with his job.
As for Allar and Franklin, there’s no question that Allar does not match the mold of quarterback Franklin has generally had success with, and while Franklin’s influence on Penn State’s offense is likely overblown for the sake of easy finger pointing, it’s not unreasonable to say that his experience with more traditional pocket passers is more limited than those who fit the mold of Allar’s predecessors. Then again, don’t recruit players you don’t have a plan for. One imagines that Franklin does. For his part Allar has looked increasingly lost in the moment but has shown enough flashes to indicate that a better work environment might lead to better work results.
“We’ve got to stay on schedule like we talked about. We’ve got to make plays for him when we have the opportunity to make plays for him,” Franklin said. “I think there’s some things that he can do and be more consistent as well, but I think the biggest thing, which I think was a question earlier, is we’ve got to be able to scare people and be a threat consistently on the perimeter. That’s something I think we’ve shown flashes of at times, but we need to be able to do that on a consistent basis. So it’s a little bit of Drew. I think it’s a little bit of the offensive line. I think it’s a little bit of the coaches. I think it’s a little bit of the wide receivers. It’s a piece of all of it. We’ve got to make some plays for him, and he’s got to make some plays as well.”
What is left is both a mess and a fresh start. The acquisition of Andy Kotelnicki and Tom Allen provides Penn State and Franklin with two established minds that stand as among the best hires Penn State could have made in the moment. All of this in the face of an expanding Big Ten puts Penn State in as reasonably good position to succeed as anything else. Kotelnicki in particular has sharpened his teeth making something out of nothing, and while Penn State’s offense might have lacked at times this year, he’ll certainly be working with more than he ever had before. This fresh start will be a welcome one for all, especially since many of Penn State’s present issues won’t go away because the season has ended.
But the mess is there too. Franklin has reached a point in his tenure where people are less interested in the truth than ever before. Nobody cares why, or if it’s even reasonable to expect things to change simply because they want them to. And that’s a tricky place for a coach to be, stuck between the reality he knows to be true and a world that doesn’t want to listen to it anymore.
Which is why Saturday felt like another step towards… something. On the one hand Penn State and Franklin sit looking into 2024 with a lot of problems, but also with a lot of hopeful solutions. How many of them they can solve between now and next season could be the difference between a Peach Bowl loss just being a complicated collection of circumstances or a slow slide into the muddy waters of the new Big Ten’s power struggle with a growing number of problems (and opponents) and a shortening list of solutions.
