Penn State Football: It All Has to Get Better. That Starts at the Top and with a Vision

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Penn State football’s biggest issue is that it has become a Rorschach test.

If you see a team that needs better players to compete at the highest level, you wouldn’t be wrong. Penn State is talented but it is not overwhelmingly so. It rarely gets blown out, but in its series against Ohio State and Michigan it is rarely the better team on paper.

If you see a team that needs better luck, you wouldn’t be wrong there either. Penn State hasn’t had a major bounce go its way since Grant Haley watched a football tumble toward him in 2016. It’s not anyone’s fault Indiana got the luck of the pylon. It’s not really anyone’s fault Sean Clifford got hurt against Iowa. These things happen, but maybe if they don’t happen Penn State finds itself on the winning side of a few more games.

If you see a program in need of upgrades — it is what it is. Penn State has good facilities, but not excellent ones. That’s part of the equation in today’s era of college football and the Nittany Lions aren’t going to be the one program in America to win a national title without investing in all the bells and whistles.

If you see a team that needs better coaching, that would be a valid observation as well. Truthfully, coaching is often the hardest thing to quantify among all of these variables because it’s challenging to connect the dots between a mistake on the field and the existence of an actual coaching error behind it. The worst free throw shooting team in basketball almost certainly practices them. Offensive linemen make mistakes but that doesn’t mean they weren’t told what to do a million times over.

It’s in all of this, following the Nittany Lions’s second consecutive five-loss season, where James Franklin and Sandy Barbour have to improve in the immediate future. The message — in detail — of what is actually wrong and what’s going to be done about it.

Because the future of Penn State football won’t be defined by whether or not Sean Clifford is an elite quarterback or an average quarterback or simply a good one. He’s going to be gone either in one more game or 12-13 more if he returns next season (which seems unlikely, but is still unknown). Penn State’s future isn’t going to be shaped by this offensive line or group of running backs. Everyone likes to spend a ton of time unpacking the good and the bad of the final game of the regular season but it doesn’t matter.

After Saturday’s 30-27 regular season finale loss at Michigan State — the Nittany Lions’ fifth defeat in seven games, sending them to a 7-5 record — Penn State’s season is a bowl game away from being over and a few weeks after that from a totally different roster. The bowl game matters for the emotional end note on the season, but that’s it.

What matters is the plan for what’s next and saying it in a way that goes beyond the broad platitudes.

And that starts with Franklin and Barbour.

Because for all Franklin has said over the past two years about improving the program, he has said little about improving himself. And for all the press release quotes Sandy Barbour has sent out into the world, she hasn’t said much of anything to anyone in front of a camera about what her role in that is.

The problem Penn State faces in the immediate future isn’t the bowl game or the offensive line or who does or doesn’t get fired. The problem is getting people on board with a plan to fix problems nobody has really explained. Franklin wants upgrades? OK well what does that mean to him? Sandy Barbour wants to support him? OK, well what does that mean? Penn State needs money to do it? Well how much? And all of this turns into winning how?

Transparency and honesty would go a long way in a moment like this. Franklin’s current cache among the fan base is the fact he represents Penn State well, his players are by and large good members of the community and he won a Big Ten Title five years ago. The Nittany Lions have won big games but they haven’t won many important ones since 2017. Franklin is a perfectly fine coach all things considered, but he suffers from being around long enough to amass a list of games he should have won. It’s a list that slowly begins to overshadow the games that he has. And once again on Saturday given the opportunity to point the finger inward, Franklin was terse. That’s his right, but not to his benefit.

As for Barbour, it remains to be seen if she will be retained at Penn State beyond the expiration of her current contract in 2023, but in either case she would be well served to help set a course for the football program that goes beyond in-house interviews that manage to say a lot of words without saying any. Then again, perhaps all of this says something about how much of a say she might have in the first place.

Penn State has a long history of being intentionally or unintentionally vague about straightforward things. Heading into the 2022 offseason the best thing both Franklin and Barbour could do is to stand up and be open about what is next for the program in a way they’ve never done before. Program building is undoubtedly complicated and involves people being on the same page and that does not always jibe well with honesty. The assumption that Franklin, the Board of Trustees and Barbour are in lockstep simply because Franklin signed a contract might be presumptuous — but all three are charged with achieving the same objectives.

In turn, signing Franklin to a 10-year deal comes with a burden of transparency. Leaving everyone to read between the lines absolves everyone actually in charge of explaining themselves and leaves a lot of uninformed people the power of deciding what the actual answers and the actual problems are. Franklin gets to write off a growing list of losses-that-probably-didn’t-need-to-happen for a vaguely undefined list of institutional shortcomings and Barbour gets to simply exist with a broad list of buildings that need to be built and salaries that could be improved without having to explain much of anything to anyone.

All of this is why the Rorschach test is more crippling to Penn State football than the answers themselves. Everyone is left guessing what the actual problem is, and left guessing what the solution is. So the Nittany Lions have a bad offensive line. OK, well how does that change? They need better facilities. What does that mean? Explain the connections to me.

When it’s all said and done everyone is going to write about Penn State’s loss to Michigan State as the latest iteration of how James Franklin has to get better. And that isn’t wrong.

But he would be well served to say so too, point a few fingers at himself even if he doesn’t feel he deserves it, and then explain to everyone what happens next. And Barbour would be well served to explain how it actually happens.

That turns a test into a vision, and that’s what Penn State needs right now.