Good-Bye Pry: Revisiting the Greatness of Penn State Football’s 2016-17 Seasons…Was It a High-Water Mark?

This past week, with Brent Pry and Joe Moorhead getting head coaching gigs, we continued to be (re-)reminded how truly great the Nittany Lions’ magical run of 2016 and ’17 was.

The lesson reinforced this week: Penn State and James Franklin had one helluva good…no, great…and likely elite…coaching staff for that stretch.

For two seasons, it was stable as well. For the only time in Franklin’s eight seasons at Penn State, he had the same set of assistant coaches in back-to-back seasons. That continuity paid off.

It was great hiring – and retention — by Franklin The CEO. 

(Reminds me of what Joe Paterno used to say this time of year, and what Franklin himself echoed Sunday: “We’ll be OK if we can just keep everybody together.”)

In 2016, Penn State was 11-3, reeled off a nine-game winning streak, took the Big Ten championship and went to the Rose Bowl, one of the best games I ever covered in 43 years of doing this. Then, in 2017, PSU went 11-2 and was ranked as high as No. 2 in the polls, capping off the season with a Fiesta Bowl over Washington.

Overall, in those two seasons Penn State went 22-5 (.815) overall and 15-3 (.833) in the Big Ten and had a streak where it won 20 of 23 games. Now, that deserved a 10-year deal.

We knew the players were great. On and off the field.

Led by Saquon Barkley, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, a total of 21 Nittany Lions who were on the 2016 and/or 2017 Penn State rosters were drafted by the NFL. And another 10 players on the ’16-17 teams who went undrafted were on an NFL roster as of June 1, 2021.

Wow.

Speaking of which: On Sunday, Tampa Bay wide receiver Chris Godwin caught a single-game  team-record 15 passes from Tom Brady against Atlanta. Godwin capped off that 2016 season, and his Penn State career, by grabbing nine passes for 187 yards and two touchdowns against USC in the scintillating 2017 Rose Bowl, won 52-49 by Clay Helton’s Trojans.

SPEAKING OF COACHES

Back to the Penn State coaches:

In the past week, Pry — the defensive coordinator of those Penn State teams — was named the head coach at Virginia Tech. And Moorhead, the offensive mastermind of those squads, got his third head coaching job, this time at Akron.

That makes four assistants on Franklin’s staff in that two-year run who are now major college football coaches – including Ricky Rahne at Old Dominion and Charles Huff at Marshall.

Rahne, Penn State’s tight ends coach in ’16-17, is 6-6 in his second year – but first season – as the head coach at ODU. The Monarchs won their final five games and earned a berth in the Myrtle Beach Bowl, only the second bowl appearance in ODU’s football history. Huff, Penn State’s running backs and special teams coach in ’16-17, was 6-5 in his first season as head coach at Marshall in 2021. Huff had associate head coaching jobs at Mississippi State (under Moorhead) and Alabama after leaving Penn State.

In a head-to-head matchup earlier this season, Huff’s Marshall squad beat Rahne’s Old Dominion team 20-13, in overtime. The reunion tour continues next year, when Pry begins his Virginia Tech head coaching career on the road on Sept. 3 against Rahne and Old Dominion.

That’s a lot coaching firepower. Franklin spotted it early. Of that quartet, Moorhead was the only assistant who didn’t come to Penn State with Franklin from Vanderbilt in January 2014.

But there’s more: Two of the assistants on that staff have also gone on to bigger things as coordinators. Josh Gattis is the offensive coordinator at Michigan, and guided the explosive and efficient Wolverine offense to a Big Ten title and a win over Ohio State this season. Like Huff, Gattis had a stint at Alabama after leaving Happy Valley.

Tim Banks, who coached with Franklin when they were assistants at Maryland, served as Penn State’s safeties coach and co-defensive coordinator from 2016-2020. In 2021, Banks was the D-coordinator at Tennessee under its new head coach, Josh Heupel. The Volunteers, who were 3-7 and pretty much a dumpster fire in 2020, turned it around and went 7-5 this season, and will culminate their season in the Music City Bowl vs. Purdue in Nashville.

The other three assistants from those 2016-17 teams are doing OK. Sean Spencer is the defensive line coach for the NFL’s New York Giants. Since Coach Chaos left, Penn State has had 42 sacks in the past 21 games. There were four years at Penn State under Spencer that his Wild Dogs had 42 sacks — or more – in a single season.

Matt Limegrover, who joined the Nittany Lions staff in 2016 as the offensive line coach, was fired after Penn State went 11-2 in 2019 (how much better has the O-line been since?). He is the offensive line coach at Arkansas State these days.

The lone holdover from Franklin’s 2016-17 staff is cornerbacks coach Terry Smith, who as a former Nittany Lion co-captain has deep roots.

These days, Franklin’s assistant coaching staff is anything but stable. After the 2017 season, three assistants left Franklin’s staff, for myriad reasons. That was followed by departures of two more (2018), then four (2019) and three assistants (2020). That’s a dozen in four years. In part, many of those departures are badges of honor for Franklin, since several are borne from opportunities created by Penn State’s success.

Franklin is up against it again this offseason, with the departure of Pry and the likely loss of coach/co-defensive coordinator Anthony Poindexter, who joined the PSU staff before this season and will soon be announced as Virginia’s head coach. Others could follow, Franklin said on a media call on Sunday night.

Coming on the heels of 4-5 and 7-5 regular-season records, that could signal even more turmoil for a Penn State program – and head coach – distracted for a good (and then bad) part of the 2021 season.

THE MT. NITTANY TOP OF 2016-17

It also underscores the special quality of that run in 2016 and ’17, which began with a 2-2 start in 2016 but was followed by streak where the Nittany Lions scored points by the dozens and flirted with a berth in the College Football Playoff both seasons.

It wasn’t all about the coaches. Obviously, as Franklin likes to say.

As mentioned, the Nittany Lions and a very deep and talented group of players on both sides, led by quarterback Trace McSorley and a veteran defense.

Just as important, the team had a certain well-deserved swagger about it. And the locker room, led by safety Marcus Allen, was lit and decidedly tight-knit. Mature team leaders set the tone. But so did Moorhead, as McSorley told me on Nov. 26, 2016 – in the minutes following the Nittany Lions’ 45-12 pounding of Michigan State, to earn a spot in the Big Ten title game. (Read the interview here.)

McSorley said Penn State’s success in 2016 was due to two things: “A big part of that is, One, the offense Coach Moorhead brought in.”

“Two is the mentality that he brought,” McSorley added. “The mentality among this team changed once Coach Moorhead stepped foot in the football building. There’s just a different light around the team, a different mentality. Guys really bought into that.

“It’s been an amazing transformation from where we were…”

As Godwin told me that day: “Coach Moorhead is very passionate. He’s a very passionate guy. We can tell that through all of our meetings. He can go from a very calm talking tone to really getting fired up as if we are going to play that day. That’s what we love about him. Each and every game he’s going to come out and call it to win. His halftime (speeches) are really fiery. He gets his blood going. His face starts to get red. It gets us going.”

The same feeling is not in Lasch these days. Especially now that Pry’s energy, faux Southern Drawl and rock-solid consistency are gone.

Of course, those Nittany Lions had the horses. They came close to the CFP in 2016, finishing No. 5 in the Selection Sunday rankings. In some ways, though, I’ve always thought that 2017 was supposed to be Penn State’s year.

The 2107 Nittany Lions were a seasoned bunch, having lost only Godwin in the draft. The  Moorhead offense was now second nature and Pry was in Year 2 of calling the defensive signals himself. It showed: Penn State’s defense pitched two shutouts in its first three games of 2017 and gave up only 67 points on the way to a 7-0 start, which included a 42-13 thrashing of Michigan.

It was also one of most veteran groups in PSU football history – in my mind, rivaling the fifth-year senior laden group of 1986, which won its second national title in five seasons — as witnessed by this chart below. The 2017 Nittany Lions had 359 starts returning. That is nearly twice the 2019 squad and almost three times that of the roster that Bill O’Brien had in 2012.

CAREER STARTS RETURNING

Here’s a look at Penn State’s preseason roster over the past decade, with career starts AT PENN STATE for returning players overall (not including kickers and punters) and along the offensive line, long an area of concern at Penn State. Season listed is for starts heading into that year. Note: PSU played only 9 games in 2020, impacting the total number of available starts by at least 3 games x 22 starts = 66.

Yr. – Career Starts Returning – O-Line Starts Returning          

2011 – 300 – 52

2012 – 132 – 15     

2013 – 164 – 36 

2014 – 216 – 43  

2015 – 245 – 51  

2016 – 276 – 91 

2017 – 359 – 88   

2018 – 202 – 82

2019 – 191 – 62  

2020 – 228 – 75

2021 – 212 – 47

In 2017, in the span of eight days it all went to hell in a handbasket. Second-ranked Penn State lost 39-38 to sixth-ranked Ohio State in The Horseshoe on Oct. 28, 2017, when the Buckeyes rallied from 11 points down in the final five minutes.

Then, the next week in East Lasing, in a game interrupted three-and-a-half hours due to a thunderstorm, seventh-ranked Penn State lost 27-24 to Michigan State on a walk-off field goal after leading24-21 in the fourth quarter.

For Penn State football, it was never truly the same again.

Penn State won its next four games, but Moorhead left before the Fiesta Bowl to become head coach at Mississippi State. Huff went with him. Gattis went to ‘Bama, to serve as co-offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach for Nick Saban after Franklin named Rahne Penn State’s new OC.

Since the start of the 2018 season, Penn State is 31-16 (.659) overall and 21-15 (.583) in the Big Ten – good, but a far cry from the high-water mark of those magical (22-5, 15-3) days of 2016-17. 

Franklin did use that two-year tun as a springboard to a 2018 recruiting class that was ranked No. 5 in the nation. It included such stars as Micah Parsons, Jayson Owen and Pat Freiermuth – all departed prior to 2021 – and current stars Jahan Dotson and Jesse Luketa. It also included Ricky Slade, Justin Shorter, Isaiah Humphries and Will Levis.

In all, by the time Penn State’s 2018 recruiting class of 23 high schoolers hit the 2021 season – their normal-progress academic senior year – only 10 were still on the Nittany Lion roster. Just six were regular starters. (Hence, a cautionary tale when assessing Penn State’s sixth-ranked 2022 class right now.)

Obviously, so much has changed since 2016-17 – the transfer portal, NIL, COVID-19, Franklin’s massive contract that pays him nearly $1,000 an hour, the ascension of Michigan and Michigan State in the Big Ten East, and 13 assistant coach hires…and counting – that it seems much longer than four-five years ago.

The departure of Brent Pry only underscores how much things have changed, and how far away it all now seems.