It has been 57 days since Penn State opened its season with a loss to Temple, a defeat talked about so much that the Nittany Lions literally buried the game film in the ground of their practice field.
Nearly two months later that defeat remains throughly covered in the cold dirt and a 39-0 thumping of Illinois a sign of the progress that has been made since that fateful afternoon in south Philadelphia. A 7-2 record a tangible source of validation that seasons are rarely decided in Week 1 and that hard work rarely goes unrewarded.
It’s the marathon mentality that has gotten Penn State to this point. Perhaps most importantly the Nittany Lions are rounding the final bend of the season in their best racing form. Those seven wins have not all been easy on the eye, but it doesn’t matter how you looked in Week 3’s win, it matters what you look like right now.
And Penn State looks like a team clicking at the right moment,
“I think as an offense we’re just fighting,” Receiver Chris Godwin said after Saturday’s win. “We’re continuing to grow and come together and fight through adversity. Anything can happen each and every week in college football, it’s hard and it’s challenging.”
“I think early on you’re not sure what kind of team you’re going to have. You might have a general idea but you never really know until you get the product on the field. I think as the season goes on you get more and more confident and come closer and closer together as a team.”
Be it confidence or simply the passage of time, Penn State is finding its stride on the offensive side of the ball as Bob Shoop and his defense continue to put together an outstanding year. The Nittany Lions opened the season averaging just 24 points a game in out of conference play. Take out a lopsided loss to No. 1 ranked Ohio State and Penn State is averaging a touchdown more a game, 31 points per contest against conference foes. That’s a figure that has helped rank Penn State third best in total scoring in the Big Ten conference, three points ahead of a bye week Michigan State program.
The question now is what comes of the remainder of 2015. A trip to Northwestern, a bye week, hosting Michigan and a trip to Michigan State close out the regular season. Find a way to win two of the three and Penn State enters bowl season with a 9-3 record with a chance to pick the program’s first 10 win campaign since 2009.
“It’s a long season regardless of what happens,” wideout DaeSean Hamilton added after the game. “You can have a bad first game but that shouldn’t define you season. Even last year seeing our offense change tremendously from dropping off there for a few games after that. Now it’s the opposite and we’re playing the game we wanted to play since the beginning and it gives you perspective for how long the season is.”
“We’re hitting it at the right point, this is the last stretch of the season and Big Ten play is getting really competitive and staying above .500 in conference play is really going to help us.”
To do that Penn State will have to win two of its last three, a tall order but not impossible. Something especially plausible if Christian Hackenberg continues his resurgence up the draft boards. Penn State’s junior signal caller throwing for 11 touchdowns and just two interceptions all season. Currently, Hackenberg is on a blistering pace of 41-of-71 passing for 701 yards and 6 scores over the past three games. For a player whose future is as highly debated as his every throw, Hackenberg is quietly reminding people why he was so highly coveted.
Then again, it helps when receivers catch the ball.
“I think that starting out the game with an easy completion helped him,” James Franklin said. “Then we went and ran a naked and the ball was a little bit low and the receiver went down and got it and made a play for him early, so he was able to get into a rhythm and there are some games where either we’d miss some throws or drop some balls and that’s hard to get into a rhythm. I thought we started a lot cleaner as a football team this week.”
“Nothing is easy, nothing is easy in the Big Ten, nothing is easy with the work that we have here at Penn State. I thought we capitalized on some opportunities tonight is what we did…I’m proud of our guys, we are getting better, we didn’t start out the season the way any of us would have liked, a lot of people wanted us to panic, we’re not going to, we are going to stay positive, we’re going to love these kids, we’re going to stick together as a family, we’re going to keep coaching, we’re going to get better, and I think that is what we are doing, and we need to do that again this week.”
And in the end, that’s all that really matters.
Because it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
