PASADENA, Calif. — As receiver KeAndre Lambert-Smith bolted into the end zone to put Penn State ahead 28-14, quarterback Sean Clifford knelt down on one knee and gazed into the field beneath him nearly 100-yards away from his teammates, escaping into a moment of solitude in front of over 90,000 people.
The pass just a few moments earlier was a thing of beauty, hitting Lambert-Smith in full stride as it pierced Utah’s defense from above. Functionally, it was a touchdown that turned Penn State’s tentative seven-point lead into a more comfortable margin. Emotionally, for a quarterback playing in his final game as a Nittany Lion, it was so much more.
“I used to pray for times like this,” the lyricist Meek Mill once said in his song “Dreams and Nightmares,” and what a dream it was for Clifford on Monday afternoon under a rainy Pasadena sky. His 16-for-22, 279-yard, two-touchdown outing was not, statistically, the best of his career — in 2022 alone he had completed more passes on seven occasions and passed for more yards on three — but the timing of it, the exclamation point on one of the biggest of stages, was what made it so special.
Because in spite of all the things that make him different than most people, Sean Clifford is also a lot like the rest of us. He is imperfect, just trying to work hard and hope that’s enough to get him where he wants to go. There is an expectation in major college football that quarterbacks will simply get better and better and better, that wanting to be good is a substitute for all of the things — tangible or otherwise — that go into becoming truly elite. In reality, a few anomalies will pop up here or there, but quarterbacks are not developed on a linear plane. They get better and become more experienced, but at some point they all hit a plateau, and that plateau is rarely where most would like it to be and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
In a sense, Clifford was always destined to come up short of the goals he truly wanted to achieve because football is simply a race to put off failure the longest rather than avoiding failure at all. Fittingly, former Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields — who was once the verbally committed quarterback of Penn State’s future and the quarterback Clifford ultimately replaced — had a career in concert with Clifford’s that also came up short of those same goals. Fields failed and did so with teams objectively better than the ones Penn State was fielding across the division. It’s a testament to the fact winning in college football is equal parts talent and then simply hoping your talent makes up for the insanity algorithm of bounces, calls, mistakes and good fortune that are thrown into the equation at rates which have no rhyme or reason. Fields appears to be an excellent quarterback with a budding NFL career, but even he couldn’t overcome the nature of the beast.
For Clifford’s part, his biggest crime to some Penn State fans is never having become the quarterback he was never going to be. While Penn State’s status of being tantalizingly close to something more has decreased many a fan’s patience, Clifford’s failure to beat Ohio State and failure to get a truly meaningful win over Michigan looms as a large splotch on his resume — when in reality those results were often more complex than his right arm and what lies between his ears.
Nevertheless he failed, but nevertheless he got up again.
For all of the things that make Clifford an occasionally polarizing Rorschach test of quarterbacking, in his four years as a starter, Clifford will leave Penn State having won 31 games — bookended with a 10-win season and an 11-win season. The COVID-19 year an excuse to find fault while Penn State’s struggles in 2021 only accentuated the value a healthy Clifford brought to the table. He was far from perfect in either year, but neither of those Penn State teams were *just* a quarterback away from much more.
All of that to the side, there is a humanity to this as well. Somewhere at the very beginning of Clifford’s career he dreamed about games like the one he played in on Monday. He dreamed about long touchdown passes, wins over Top 10 teams and playing at the Rose Bowl in front of a sea of fans.You do not embark on the matters of quarterbacking without those dreams; you do not submit yourself to the long hours and public scrutiny without aspirations of those moments when it pays off. You don’t fail in front of thousands of people without hoping to one day succeed.
It’s what makes college football and college sports so great. Time is finite for us all, but as Clifford was given his curtain call and walked off the field, tears in his eyes and the crowd roaring with approval, it could be his last as a football player. In reality, Clifford will do something quarterback-related for some amount of time going forward but what and for how long is unknown. He could find his place on an NFL roster or in Canada or Europe, but the most likely outcome is that Clifford’s football career is on the downward part of the bellcurve.
And there is romance in knowing that and seeing Clifford play the way he did on Monday. In the waning moments of his Penn State career, with fans eager to see freshman Drew Allar take over the offense, Clifford managed to make everyone forget about the future and enjoy the present. Ironically, if he could have done that sooner, many of the things he achieved at Penn State may have been appreciated a bit more than they have been.
“I’m just happy for him,” James Franklin said after the game. “He’s kind of seen it all in his Penn State career, and at Penn State it’s important not how we just do it on the football field but in the classroom and in the community, and he’s done it with utmost class the entire time. That’s what college football is about, and that’s what Penn State is about.”
When it’s all said and done, Sean Clifford’s career was the romance of life, just trying to make it all work out, and then basking in the moments when it all comes together and all you can feel is joy, something like a warm California rain washing away the things that came before. Living in the moment for as long as you can hang onto it.
