Penn State Beats No. 11 Wisconsin as Ranked Wins Feel More and More Common

As Penn State students prepared to storm the court on Tuesday night just moments before the Nittany Lions finished off a 87-83 victory over No. 11 Wisconsin, it was as much a rite of passage as anything else. College basketball is meant for things like this, the random January upsets that keep us watching otherwise meaningless games, because maybe tonight is the night we see something special.

The interesting thing for Penn State: Tuesday night was special, but it’s also becoming far less unusual.

For the tenure of Mike Rhoades, a victory over a top 15 team in the dead of winter is undoubtedly a meaningful moment for him and his program. However long he stays at Penn State, it will be a benchmark of something good that happened along the way. This particular Penn State team seems a tad too inconsistent and a bit too incomplete to do anything of serious note in 2024, but as Tuesday showed, that doesn’t mean they won’t go down without a fight.

But for Penn State men’s basketball at large, there’s something to be said for how unsurprising Tuesday really was. In fact it marked the 12th win the program has had over a ranked opponent since December of 2019, a figure that now spans four head coaches (prior to that Penn State had 12 ranked wins in the seven seasons prior). That’s likely not as high as some more established programs across the country, and the Big Ten is effectively a schedule of ranked teams, but for Penn State it’s something of a testament to how far things have come. The Nittany Lions might be flawed this year, but for the most part Penn State hasn’t fielded a truly bad team in what feels like ages. There have been some bumps in the road, but everything about the status of Penn State men’s basketball in 2024 runs circles around most (but not all) of the teams the Nittany Lions fielded in the early to middle stages of the program’s existence in the Big Ten.

It’s a pointless endeavor to try and compare in any linear fashion the ups and downs of growth the program has seen over the last 20-30 years, but it seems reasonable to claim that right now, Penn State men’s basketball has never been more equipped to have a reasonable chance to win on any given night. This particular team — a byproduct of coaching transitions —is an outlier in its composition but still maintains that standard of being good enough when everything comes together.

And on Tuesday night it did — the Nittany Lions working out to a 12-point first half lead over Wisconsin behind unusually consistent shooting, making five attempts from beyond the arc en route to an eventual 39-35 halftime lead. Penn State shot nearly 47% from the field in the opening 20 minutes of play, a clip that seemed a bit too high for an otherwise streaky team to maintain in the second half. All the same four different Nittany Lions managed seven or more points in the first half, so the options were there. If only they could stay hot.

And then the Nittany Lions shot 60% from the field in the second half, made all but two of their 13 free throws and saw Kanye Clary and Ace Baldwin Jr combined for 32 of Penn State’s 48 second half points. There were defensive stops, and even as Penn State went -11 on the glass, six blocks, eight steals and just six turnovers all game helped even out the play in other ways. Clary finished with 27 points, Baldwin with 20 while Nick Kern managed 15 of his own. Even for a player who is perpetually burdened with having to all of the “big man things’ Qudus Wahab continued his timely play with four blocks and four points in 12 minutes of play as the Nittany Lions went +14 with him on the floor.

Everything went well, and for the 12th time in five seasons, it didn’t feel all that surprising. And for Penn State men’s basketball, upset wins not coming as a surprise might be the biggest upset this program has ever had.