BLOOMINGTON– All things considered an Indiana team that has steadily improved over the past few seasons and has historically played Penn State well at home, finally winning a game in the series is not all that shocking.
It wasn’t really that it happened, it was how it happened and the fact Penn State didn’t look like Penn State in the process.
There were the turnovers, three to be exact. In comparison Penn State had 14 all of the 2019 season, in 2016 the Nittany Lions coughed it up just 13 times. On both occasions that figure was good enough for 20th and 8th best in the nation respectively. Some of this had to do with bombproof Saquon Barkley, but Penn State has generally not had to worry about giving the ball up for free.
There were the penalties. Penn State committed 10 of those on Saturday night. For five-straight seasons the Nittany Lions have ranked inside the Top 30 in fewest penalties per game. In 2016 Penn State was 8th in the nation, rarely flagged, rarely found guilty of breaking the rules in a game with plenty to break.
It wasn’t that Penn State lost, it was that it didn’t look like the Penn State team fans have come to expect over the past few seasons. Those teams have not looked perfect, but they have almost never lost due to a laundry list of self-inflicted and highly preventable wounds. Losses have been found in the margins of imperfections both on the sideline and between them. To lose is to error, but the Nittany Lions have rarely made so many over the span of four quarters.
So nothing about Saturday looked familiar.
Of course in some ways it did. Penn State managed to start strong, a 13-play, 64-yard march across a crisp Bloomington afternoon that rang in the Nittany Lions’ first game in 300 days with authority.
That was familiar, Penn State has started most of its big games well over the past few years. The first punch has never really been an issue. The Nittany Lions looked the part and looked like a team ready to play after a long, strange and emotional offseason.
Of course in other ways it reminded you of the larger issues Penn State hasn’t been able to solve. After scoring early, the Nittany Lions would have the ball seven more times before finally putting points on the board again. Two missed field goals in that stretch loomed more and more consequential as the game rolled along.
“We shot ourselves in the foot too many times,” tight end Pat Freiermuth said after the game. “I don’t think our attention to detail was great.”
Despite all of this Penn State managed to more than double Indiana’s offensive output, racking up 250 yards on the ground despite the absence of Journey Brown and the loss of Noah Cain to injury. Sean Clifford, in spite of his own two -frankly horrible- interceptions, still slung out 238 yards through the air, 60 of those to Jahan Dotson for what appeared to be the winning score.
“I felt good, but I made two critical errors I wish I could have back,” Clifford added.
And then there were the last five minutes, an almost impossible to describe sequence of events. Penn State scored, got a stop. Then Indiana let Penn State score again to make it an eight-point game in a move that you think about but never actually see.
Then Indiana drove the length of the field to score and tie the game with a two-point conversion. Then, for some untold reason other than to add to the lunacy of the evening, Indiana squibbed the kickoff giving Penn State a shot at a 57-yard field goal that landed inches short. Then Penn State scored in overtime, then Indiana scored in overtime, then it went for two and then it -maybe, maybe not- won the game on the kind of replay that makes you glad you aren’t actually a referee. [As an aside, don’t think Penix scored, but also don’t think there was a definitive angle to overturn.]
All of this. ALL of it. Was insane. To try and quantify it as normal would be doing a disservice to the dozens and dozens of normal games that happen every weekend. Any one of the weird things that happened in the final few minutes and overtime would have been enough to give you something to talk about for the next week, let alone all of them happening at the same time.
In all honestly nobody even really remembers the second quarter. Missed field goal, a fumble and two interceptions ago. Those were simpler times.
As for that Devyn Ford’s touchdown that Penn State didn’t want to score; Clifford, Freiermuth and James Franklin all stated two things simultaneously:
- Yes they went over it both during the game and in practice [don’t score]
- Turning the ball over three times and taking 10 penalties and missing two field goals is how you lose more often than not, no matter how that plays ends.
“One play can’t lose the game, but one play can always win the game,” Clifford said.
Something along those lines.
There is a tendency to find moments like these and just broadly blame coaching, which isn’t unfair considering Penn State didn’t need to make kneeling the ball more complicated than kneeling the ball. But the rest, that’s complicated.
‘What we wanted to do is get as much as you can and get down,’ James Franklin said. ‘That’s that situation. We’ve covered it, we went through it during the game, but, again, it was a bunch of situations that came up.’
You can see the moment when Ford realizes what he’s about to do and tries to undo the act of scoring the football. This is, as you might imagine, hard to do as someone who is wired to run very fast towards that end zone. He does this funny little moonwalk to try and erase it, but he can’t. It’s too late. It’s not that he wasn’t coached, because you can see the exact moment that coaching kicks in: a moment too late.
Whatever Penn State’s defense should or shouldn’t have done late in the game is at least partially secondary to the fact it held Indiana to 211 yards of offense and held star wideout Whop Philyor to a polite 36 yards of offense. The idea Penn State’s defense should just perpetually become impenetrable ignores the fact that A: this seems unreasonable and B: Penn State’s defense has spent the better part of the past two seasons making up for the fact Penn State’s offense struggles juuuust enough for two thirds of every meaningful game to make things more interesting than they probably ought to be.
But in fairness, whatever Penn State’s offense did or didn’t do, it did manage 35 points, 40 minutes of possession, 87 plays, and nearly 500 yards of offense while seven different targets caught passes and darn near every healthy running back on the roster carried the ball. Also surprisingly Penn State converted 9-of-17 attempts on third down.
There’s also Penn State’s special team’s unit, which for lack of a better word provided nothing other than a list of things that needed to improve as well as a short list of good things that largely began and end with Jordan Stout being on the team but not 2% stronger kicking a 57-yard field goal into a slight breeze.
In short -if that’s even possible after a game like this- Penn State got in its own way a lot more than Indiana beat the Nittany Lions. The Hoosiers scoring 36 points is not a mistake and is a testament to how good they are, but smarter throws, better kicks and a few penalties here or there are the difference between a somewhat comfortable Penn State win and flipping a coin on a replay review.
“It needs to hurt, because hurting means growth,” Freiermuth.
There’s also the whole question of the unique schedule. Considering that Indiana was perhaps more opportunistic [three scoring drives under 45 yards] than simply vastly superior team, it’s worth questioning whether Penn State was truly unprepared and wildly outcoached or that there is simply a difference between playing Indiana in Week 1 and playing Akron, Idaho and Kent State.
“We’ve got to find a way to get it done.” Franklin said.
And this is true, you’re playing who you play and you prepare for that game. Penn State opens at Wisconsin in 2022 and will not look to repeat such an odd performance, albeit it is also hopeful for a far more normal offseason in the lead up.
In the long run the obstacle Penn State faces now is just getting out of its own way. It will probably lose to Ohio State because that’s just sort of how things work but the rest of the schedule is manageable enough that 500 yards of offense minus three turnovers and 10 penalties ought to be enough.
There is no good way to wrap up a game like this one. The bad was really bad, the good probably got overlooked. Just about everyone would like a call or two back. But hey, who wouldn’t.
And one imagines none of this would matter if Michael Penix’s arm is just a bit shorter.
