It’s a testament to the degree of success Penn State has had under James Franklin that entire seasons have been boiled down to a binary evaluation. Did Penn State beat Michigan and/or Ohio State? Many fans don’t need to look past that answer to come up with an overarching feeling toward the rest of the season.
Which is probably how we ended up with Penn State backing into the Rose Bowl, picking up one of the more meaningful postseason wins of the last 30 years and leaving a somewhat confused taste in everyone’s mouth. That was a good season, right? The Rose Bowl is good, beating a top 10 team is good, but what about the rest of it? How does one reconcile the fact Penn State did a lot of very good things while also coming up short of its much bigger goals?
That answer is up for each to decide. It’s hard to deny — no matter how bad Auburn ended up being — that handily beating the Tigers on the road was impressive. It’s hard to deny that making a late comeback against Purdue was an important victory. It’s hard to deny that the Nittany Lions were playing some of the best football in America by the time the Rose Bowl came around and turned losses to Michigan and Ohio State into jumping off points for truly dominant defense and a punishing home-run hitting ground game. It’s hard to deny that winning 11 games is a very good thing.
Make no mistake, wins or losses against Michigan and Ohio State hold their value in the bigger picture, but Penn State needed this season no matter the outcome in those two games. It needed to get a little bit of legitimate swagger back, it needed to play a top 10 team in the Rose Bowl and win convincingly. It needed to turn “almost” into “did it” and the Nittany Lions did exactly that for nearly all of 2022.
Which is why in the residual fallout of Sean Clifford’s swan song in Pasadena, coach James Franklin deserves a little bit of credit for this season, too. In the face of the most quarterback-decision pressure he has faced in his tenure and the building pressure to turn things around after two lackluster seasons, the Nittany Lions got back to scoring points, playing defense and beating the hell out of everyone they should. Franklin pushed the right buttons, navigated the Clifford and Drew Allar dynamic well and finally once again made good on the idea if you give him a healthy team and remove a pandemic that things are going to be OK.
It is fair to say Franklin could have done a better job in each of the last two years, but as the Nittany Lions face a very bright future on the back of the season they just had, it’s also fair to say it doesn’t matter much. Remove the oddities of COVID-19 and Penn State has won 11 games four of the last six years. The 2021 season is a confusing mess of injuries and roster management, but with Clifford never fully healthy again that year, the utility of finger pointing is minimized. Everyone can do better, but that doesn’t always mean the failure to do so is anything systemic.
In the bigger picture, it’s a reasonable expectation that Penn State’s perpetually close defeats to Ohio State will need to change — even if not for the sake of an expanded playoff format but simply for the sake of beating the Buckeyes from time to time to win some psychological battles. It’s a good sign that removed from the familiarity of conference play that Penn State managed to look so good against a top 10 team in Utah. In an expanded playoff, Penn State’s ability to beat the teams it doesn’t see on an annual basis might end up holding more value than the ones that it does. Time will tell if that theory holds true.
Nevertheless, in a moment Franklin needed to turn Penn State around, he and his staff did exactly that. While to some extent Franklin is paid his millions of dollars to supply Penn State with a winning formula against the nation’s best, he’s also paid his millions to create consistency. 11-2 might come up just short of bigger and better goals, but there are worse baselines to work with, and new faces might have to work just as long to get back to exactly this point, but perhaps that much more further behind everyone else.
Now the question is, with the quarterback he’s always wanted and the talent around that quarterback, if Franklin can take that next step.
