In Hindsight, 2020 Started Early for Penn State Football

Penn State is 3-4 in its last seven games. In its last six contests, it has played Indiana and Ohio State twice, going 1-3.

Given Penn State’s track record of three New Year’s Six bowl appearances in the past four seasons, that is certainly an anomaly.

Have the Nittany Lions hit a wall, a pause or simply dropped a pair due, in part, to losing their Big Two — Micah Parsons and Journey Brown — and two Buckeyes too many? 

Let’s think back to 358 days ago:

Think back to the morning of November 9, 2019.

That cold, crisp day in Minneapolis held such promise for Penn State football.

(Bitter cold, in fact: I got to the stadium very early that morning, and caught ESPN’s Holly Rowe doing a sideline dance to stay warm. The clip since been seen by #631k people on Twitter. Watch it here.)

Holly’s mood that day = Penn State football’s mood that week.

The Nittany Lions entered that game against undefeated, 17th-ranked Minnesota with an 8-0 record, ranked fourth in the nation and owners of the No. 4 spot in the College Football playoff weekly rankings. They were on a run that since starting in 2-2 in 2016, had resulted in 37 victories and just 7 losses.

That run ended, and ended Penn State’s CFP hopes, when the Gophers’ Jordan Howden picked off Sean Clifford’s pass in the end zone with 61 seconds remaining, Cliff’s third pick of the game as Minnesota won, 31-27.

For the Gophers, Clifford’s counterpart and good friend, Tanner Morgan, completed 18 of 20 passes for 339 yards and three touchdowns. Minnesota finished 11-2 and capped its best season in over 50 years with a win over No. 12 Auburn in the Outback Bowl.

Penn State left the Twin Cities 8-1, barely beat Indiana 34-27 the next week and fell 28-17 to Ohio State in The Horseshoe.

Penn State’s consolation prize? The acquisition of Minnesota OC Kirk Ciarrocca to be their QB coach and coordinator, their third OC/QB coach in four seasons.

Since then, though, save for a win in the Cotton Bowl against a gutsy and entertaining Memphis squad from the Group of 5, it seems like the dark clouds of 2020 have been hanging over the Nittany Lions as if they were Eeeyore or Charlie Brown.

24-3 vs. 16-8

Counting that loss to PJ Fleck & Co., Penn State has been the aforementioned, less-than-stellar 3-4, with the truncated and twisted 2020 season off to an 0-2 start — the first such beginning in Franklin’s seven seasons at Penn State.

Compounding that string, Penn State has been just 16-8 (.667) since its come-from-ahead 27-26 loss to Ohio State in the Good Great Elite Bowl in Beaver Stadium in 2018. Not bad, but not great. In those 24 games, Penn State played 10 ranked teams, going 4-6 overall. Half of those losses were by 5 or fewer points, the other half by 11 or more.

In the 27 games before the 2018 Ohio State game, Penn State was a stellar, almost stunning 24-3 (.852) — testament to the remarkable rebuilding job James Franklin had done at Penn State, which earned him a new, guaranteed contract worth $35 million.  

Since? Not so much.

In fact, in a lot of ways the past 51 weeks, especially, have been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Former five-star wide receiver Justin Shorter and four-star running back Ricky Slade transferred, as did freshman quarterback Michael Johnson Jr. and diamond gem Mac Hippenhammer.

K.J. Hamler and Yetur Gross-Matos left for the NFL with eligibility remaining, though hard to blame them since both landed in the second round and signed for millions.

Parsons left (at least) a year early, though seems to be everywhere on Twitter, especially when his former team plays. Brown became ill. Noah Cain got injured.

A host of Nittany Lions were busted for pot — and, one of them, for LSD — in their campus apartments.

Franklin dismissed O-line coach Matt Limegrover, bid adieu to favored son Ricky Rahne and the latest annual rent-a-WR coach, Gerad Parker, as well as longtime D-line guru and the team’s one-man pep rally, Sean Spencer. Rahne, who may have gotten a little push, took a host of Penn State staffers and GA’s to Old Dominion with him.

Chaos left, but it looked like some chaos remained.

Recruiting, long considered Franklin’s forte, hasn’t been so hot either. PA high school star and CJF big target Julian Fleming opted for the 416-mile trip to The Horseshoe instead of the 85-minute drive to Beaver Stadium. Sans Fleming, Penn State ranked No. 15 in recruiting in 2019. Right now, according to Rivals, they rank No. 35 in recruiting for the Class of 2021, wedged between Kentucky and N.C. State. Oh yeah: Nolan Rucci — he of two Penn State parents who were Penn State sports stars — is going to be a Badger.

Add it all up, factor in Covid-19 and three separate 2020 Big Ten football schedules, and Penn State’s football world has been turned sideways, if not upside down. Join the club.

This is how goofy the Covid world has made Big Ten football. Indiana, Purdue and Northwestern each has started the conference season 2-0 — the first time that. Has. Ever. Happened.

Certainly not all of the above can be pinned on Franklin or his program. The recent stretch may just be a small shift in the Nittany Nation equilibrium, greatly exacerbated by the trauma of the times and the erasure of the start of the 2020 season that was to have played out this way:

Spring practice and the install of Ciarrocca’s new offense, Blue-White Game, summer practice, Kent State, Virginia Tech, San Jose State, Northwestern.

None of it happened. None of it.

OTHER LOSSES

In its wake is Penn State’s 194-game streak of crowds of at least 90,000 in Beaver Stadium (started on Sept. 7, 1991, with 94,000 on hand for that epic 81-0 win over Cincinnati). Gone.

Gone is the Nittany Lions’ 63-game streak of weekly appearances in The Associated Press Top 25 poll — started after the Nittany Lions’ 24-21 White Out of Ohio State on October 22, 2016, the third-longest such string in PSU history. (Expect the Lions back in the coming weeks.)

Gone, perhaps, is the $69 million project to enhance Lasch Building, Holuba Hall and the accompanying football practice fields, given that Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics announced last week that it is facing a $70 million shortfall in fiscal year 2020-21. You cannot but help to note the tidy symmetry of that math: Instead of fundraising for the renovations, put the donations toward the deficit.

Gone, at least for the 2020 season, is any consistent semblance of a Penn State running game. And, as former Buckeye Joey Galloway said on ESPN’s College Football Final on Saturday night, ‘Penn State had 44 yards rushing against Ohio State. If you can’t run, you can’t win.’

Gone, at least for the past few games, is the vaunted Penn State defense that Bob Shoop then Brent Pry built for Franklin when they arrived in Happy Valley in 2014.

Over the past three games, the Nittany Lions’ D has surrendered 39 points (Memphis, Cotton Bowl), 36 points (Indiana, 2020 season opener) and 38 points (Justin Fields & Co.). The last time a Penn State football team gave up 35 or more points in three consecutive games was in 1899 — in losses at Yale (42-0), at Penn (47-0) and on the road against the Duquesne Athletic Club (64-5).

Yes, the Nittany Lions don’t have Parsons this season. And yes, they were missing linebacker Jesse Luketa for the first half on Saturday (due to a targeting call at Indiana). But, that’s a long time and a lot of depleted defenses for a record like that to stand.

THE TABLE IS SET

This is not to suggest that Nittany Lions can’t run the table and finish the season 7-2. They can…if they even get nine games in.

They also could lose a few more.

Maryland and Tua’s younger brother will provide a challenge for the Nittany Lions’ secondary — which has yielded 488 yards and five TDs in two games — in Beaver Stadium next Saturday afternoon. Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan and even Rutgers and Michigan State have shown enough in the first two games of 2020 to make any opponent this year look like it could win under these extreme circumstances.

Then there’s The Virus.

The toughest foe of 2020, no doubt.

But…with Franklin under contract through the end of 2025, there is plenty of time for Penn State to get back on track.

If there was ever a year when you chalk it all up to extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances, this is it. Right?

I mean, who else gets to play Ohio State twice in a five-game span — especially when that span covers 49 weeks and the second game comes smack-dab in the middle of a pandemic?

Lucky Penn State, that’s who. And by lucky, we mean especially not in 2020 — a year that began 53 days early for the Nittany Lions and can’t end soon enough for almost everybody.