Penn State Football: A Win Is a Win, but This One Also Makes Things Complicated

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Things would have been easier to grapple with if Penn State had lost its season opener on Thursday night at Purdue.

If Penn State had lost ,you could make sense of it. You could say that Sean Clifford was exactly the kind of player he has always been, good but also prone to all the things that make him a divisive figure in the Penn State football landscape. The kind of quarterback who can throw a preventable pick-six but still throw for four touchdowns and run for another.

If Penn State had lost, you could have pointed to an offensive line that was simply *fine* and nothing more than that. It did not instill a confidence that Penn State’s running game was suddenly about to turn a corner. If you were looking for improvement, it was fleeting and in spurts. Perhaps those spurts can turn into a stream, but Thursday night was not that night.

If Penn State had lost, you could have pointed to an insistence that running the ball was — and must be — a part of Penn State’s DNA in spite of the fact it does not need to be.

If Penn State had lost, you could have turned to dropped passes by a trio of receivers who stumbled out of the gates in the wake of sure-handed Jahan Dotson’s departure. You could have looked at a defense that was at times a shell of its former self, making just enough stops to win but making just enough mistakes or missing just enough opportunities to still nearly lose the game.

You could have pointed to a lot of things.

But then Penn State won.

And that complicates things because all of the above can still be true and yet Penn State is 1-0 with a chance to grow from those mistakes. The Nittany Lions will almost certainly improve over the next 14 days before traveling to Auburn to face the Tigers with a meeting against Ohio sandwiched in the middle. It’s hard to deny in the chaotic universe of college football that winning is winning, and if you won matters a lot more than how you did it.

But for James Franklin, the brief appearance of true freshman quarterback Drew Allar only muddies already muddy waters. Allar was in many ways simply competent in his brief stint. He completed two passes, saw two more fail to connect (one well thrown but dropped), stood tall in the pocket and moved with a smoothness that was hard to ignore. It was a brief glimpse into the future and that future looked bright. Whatever Clifford’s shortcomings might be, there has yet to be a logical second option. While it might have been brief, and while there is a certain degree of “seeing what you want to see” when it comes to a four-pass drive, Allar looked like a second option.

And yet with the game hanging in the balance, Penn State’s flawed and polarizing quarterback waltzed out onto the field and crafted a masterful game-winning drive. For all of the clamoring to have Allar swoop in and be the hero of the day, Clifford stood poised like the veteran quarterback he is and saved the best for last, winning the game in the process. Allar may have done the same, but in a world that has everything to do with winning right now he was an uncertainty. Even if Clifford is inconsistent to a fault his ratios of good-to-bad are known, Allar’s are – at present – not.

The challenge now for Franklin will be grappling with a three-pronged reality that has turned Penn State’s quarterback situation into a quasi-referendum on his tenure and his newly minted 10-year contract.

The first prong is what he knows: data and countless hours watching all of his quarterbacks. One moderately competent, scoreless drive by Allar was nothing if not promising but it was also not a full battery of tests and results. Allar’s weakness are a mystery, his bad habits not even hinted at yet for those not privy to what happens behind closed doors.

The second prong is what Clifford is and what he isn’t. It is not a particularly controversial opinion to say that while Sean Clifford and Trace McSorley were or continue to be quality college football quarterbacks that they are/were still a step below the truly elite in the game. Whatever Clifford ends up doing this season, nothing about Thursday night led you to believe that he or his teammates are destined to do anything more than what they’ve been doing — they will win most of the games they should, and maybe one of the games they shouldn’t. Then again, in fairness to them, Penn State’s 2016 season started off on far worse notes than Thursday night’s.

Of course, this is not a horrible place to be. Many a college football program would like to have the privilege of winning, eight, nine or 10 games and feeling dissatisfied. The challenge of course is that four years of knowing full well what will probably happen has soured many to this purgatory that has plagued Penn State since the conclusion of the 2017 season. If an expanded playoff would change that tune is something we all may find out soon enough.

Which brings us to the third prong. Franklin could, in a fit of complete change in character, decide to play Allar. Whatever Franklin did this year would be bulletproof if Allar sees the field for good. It would be the program changing the goalie in a blowout hockey game to send a message. It would be a spark that could turn the page on a program that is in desperate need of something — anything — to get it going again. It would give Franklin a bit of push in a fundraising moment to look toward the future and sell people on a vision of the quarterback and team that could be.

But Franklin almost certainly won’t do that, because as Sean Clifford marched Penn State down the field he reminded everyone that the only thing that really matters is winning, and until proven otherwise Penn State’s best chance to win right now is him. Allar might be the quarterback of the future, but a grass is always greener approach to personnel management is how you lose games that you could have won. And winning is all that matters.

That said, it sure does makes things more complicated.