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Penn State Men’s Basketball: Nittany Lions Face Slightly Easier Slate in Second Half of Big Ten Play

Coming off a loss to Rutgers just a few days ago, Penn State men’s basketball sits at 13-7 on the year and 4-5 in Big Ten play at the midway point of the conference season. It has been a strange 2022-23 so far for the usually dominant Big Ten, with 10 different teams within a four-game lead of first place and only one team currently ranked in the Top 25. For better or worse it has been Purdue and then everyone else, the Nittany Lions joining the majority of the conference simultaneously within reach and well out of reach of the Boilermakers.

For Penn State, aspirations of winning the Big Ten were likely never going to be realized, but a postseason appearance — either two decades in the making or just a few years depending on your view of the NCAA Tournament that never happened due to COVID-19 — is still very much in the works. The Nittany Lions currently sit 58th in the NET Ratings which are, for the sake of simplicity, the most straightforward gauge of a given team’s postseason aspirations. It’s not the end all be all, but it’s a good place to start.

In any case, with at least 11 regular season games and the Big Ten Tournament left to go, the Nittany Lions are still in the thick of the things. As of this writing Penn State is projected by CBS to be part of play-in game series, or effectively among the last four teams to make the tournament. That obviously could change over time – especially as CBS last updated their projections prior to Penn State’s loss at Rutgers – but the overarching point is the same; the Nittany Lions still have plenty to play for.

Thankfully for coach Micah Shrewsberry and his staff, things *might* get a bit easier the second half of the year. After games against No. 1 Purdue and Michigan in the coming week, the Nittany Lions will play nine games against teams with a current combined record of 108-70. That 60% win rate goes up against a 119-59 record that opened up the early stages of conference play, or a 67% win rate.

While teams will surge and fall, impacting that figure in both directions, Penn State still has games against lowly Minnesota, Illinois, a confused Ohio State team which has gone 1-7 in its last eight games, two contests against Maryland and another crack at Nebraska among others. No night in the Big Ten is ever an easy night, but Penn State could possibly find its footing yet again in the back half of the year, well on its way to a winning season.

So fear not, even if a loss at Rutgers and challenging games against Michigan and Purdue lay ahead, a slightly more palatable road is not far around the corner, even if easier doesn’t mean easy in Big Ten play.