Death, taxes and Penn State is on the verge of winning the Big Ten, going to the College Football Playoff and maybe more!
The recency bias in college football media never fails to impress. Generally speaking, when a team does good one year, it is now a formidable force to be reckoned with and in no way going to take a step back. If a team is bad, that’s it, it’s over, everybody pack up your things and go home.
Unless you’re one of three teams: USC, Texas and Penn State.
USC isn’t just back now that Lincoln Riley has taken over the controls, it’s a nouveau pick for the College Football Playoff.
Texas is the ‘backiest ‘ team to ever be back perennially, with no one ever learning the hard lessons from the year before. Penn State is a different proposition entirely.
The Nittany Lions have been, generally, quite good, with some up years and some down years, usually alternating. It’s definitely leagues above the other two aforementioned schools, yet, the media loves to pretend that it has been ‘on the verge’ ever since beating Ohio State — six years ago.
Now when Penn State plays Ohio State in its annual matchup, the media fawns, ‘You never know what’s going to happen when these two teams play!’ Except, yes — we do.
PSU head coach James Franklin is 1-7 against the Buckeyes with the sole win being a game in 2016 when OSU seemingly let off the gas while Penn State pulled off a miraculous comeback. This was a Penn State team that had two losses at that point, including a 49-10 drubbing by Michigan, and that no one thought was better than the Buckeyes or Wolverines that year. The window for opportunity was the following year, 2017. While the Nittany Lions were very good that year, they lost to Ohio State and Michigan State in successive weeks, undermining their championship caliber dreams.
James Franklin is 42-19 since that 2016 season, not at all a bad record, but not exactly a convincing argument that Penn State is about to take the next step. The recruiting has improved markedly, but at No. 16 in the 247Sports talent composite, it’s still one spot behind lowly Michigan.
I’m speaking in sarcastic terms here, to some degree, thanks to a mailbag in The Athletic in which Ari Wasserman proclaimed that Penn State was the only Big Ten school not named Ohio State that could contend for a national championship. Wasserman said Michigan (and MSU) aren’t built to beat teams in the CFP, even though they’ve both been in it while Penn State hasn’t. ($)
Yes, the Big Ten is the second-best conference. But when you look at it closely, Ohio State is the only program that is truly equipped to win a national championship. Yes, Michigan State and Michigan have both advanced to the Playoff, but neither was built to beat Alabama or an Alabama-like team two games in a row in the postseason. There is a huge gap between making the Playoff and winning it all.
If we aren’t considering USC or UCLA yet, the pick has to be Penn State. Love him or hate him, James Franklin just signed a 10-year deal and he had a program in 2021 that ranked No. 16 in the 247Sports Talent Composite. Penn State is probably 10 spots outside of the range it needs to be to compete for a national title, but you have to consider that spot takes into account Penn State’s 2021 recruiting class, which was the worst effort of the Franklin era. Penn State fans are hoping that was a COVID-19-related fluke, and that seems to be the case when considering how the Nittany Lions have been recruiting the last two cycles.
Since Jim Harbaugh arrived, Michigan hasn’t been markedly better than Penn State. His record since 2016 has been 40-18. Yet, for all of the ‘Michigan can’t beat ranked teams on the road’ narratives, though Franklin has had the same issues, he appears immune to that criticism. And the argument that PSU is ‘on the verge’ while Michigan is not ignores that the Wolverines actually played in the CFP last year — less than a calendar year ago. Unlike Penn State’s win over Ohio State six years ago, the maize and blue beat the Buckeyes last year — and soundly. Yet, there’s zero expectation that Michigan could do like Dabo Swinney’s Clemson and build on that success, climbing the ladder after years of being merely good. No, that reservation has been booked by James Franklin’s Penn State, and unfortunately, the restaurant is booked for the next decade.
I use this to illustrate not that Michigan should be the team ‘on the verge,’ but how silly some of these narratives are and continue to be. And there are always interesting team-specific narratives that don’t die. For Michigan, it’s that any positive season was a fluke and it’ll come back down to earth — and it’s a narrative that the Wolverines have tended to be happy to acquiesce. For Michigan State, it’s the luck factor, which, again, tends to play out. For Penn State, however, despite similar success in-conference as Michigan, it’s seen as a scrappy team ready for the next step, while the Wolverines aren’t allowed to similarly improve. Even when they improve, they didn’t, you just didn’t see it correctly.
Meanwhile, Franklin’s Penn State is 11-11 in its last 22 games, but trust us, the media, it meant to win all 22 and very well could do it any time in the foreseeable future.
Unreal.
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