Penn State basketball is searching for its first NCAA Tournament berth under coach Patrick Chambers. The former Boston University head coach is in his ninth season in State College. Penn State administrators have been very patient with him. A 10-2 start with a win over Maryland has Penn State firmly in the NCAA Tournament hunt with a legitimate chance to give Chambers prolonged job security in the Big Ten. In the short term, that is obviously PSU’s foremost goal and challenge. Yet, the decade of the 2020s presents a bigger question surrounding the Nittany Lions on the hardwood: “Can they develop real momentum?”
Penn State isn’t Rutgers or Nebraska. Penn State has actually made a Sweet 16 this century. Rutgers and Nebraska are programs where momentum is less important than making a one-time breakthrough. Rutgers wants to make an NCAA Tournament. Nebraska wants to win its first NCAA Tournament game. Those programs will worry about other, bigger things after reaching those milestones. Penn State doesn’t have a 29-year NCAA drought (Rutgers) or the unique burden of never having won an NCAA tourney game (Nebraska). The Nittany Lions, as they pursue the Big Dance this season, need to figure out how to have a period of modest — but continuous — success. They don’t know what that looks like, at least not in modern times.
Penn State has made four NCAA Tournaments since the expansion of the tournament field to 64 teams in 1985. Those four bids have all been spaced out by at least five years: 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2011. Penn State would love to have just one period of five years in which it makes two NCAA Tournaments, or a nine-year period in which it makes three NCAA tourneys. Just that — just that modest pattern of continued success — would represent a BIG improvement for Penn State basketball.
It makes one appreciate the phenomenal consistency of Wisconsin basketball this century, and it also reminds one of the landscape in the early 1990s, when Wisconsin was the Big Ten program in search of a transformation. That transformation clearly arrived in Madison. The people of University Park, Pa., are looking for the same in the coming decade.