About Last Saturday
Disappointment takes many forms
The local college football teams were the main event in Pittsburgh sports this past weekend, what with the Steelers on a bye week and the Penguins – despite being dragged to another win by Sidney Crosby – still looking for all the world like a team headed for the draft lottery.
Pitt entered the day 7-0 for the first time since 1982, and looking for their biggest win of the year, and Penn State had yet another crack at knocking off a vulnerable Ohio State team, and strengthening its status next to Oregon as one of the Big Ten’s big dogs.
They both got run over by a truck, albeit at different speeds.
Let’s start with Penn State, the better program, with the more realistic big dreams. Their fans lead a puzzling, only partly-fulfilling existence. On one hand, James Franklin has inarguably turned the Nittany Lions into a perennial top-10 program. He recruits that way. Penn State has a talent advantage over almost every team in the Big Ten.
How big of a talent advantage?
The Nittany Lions are 28-1 against everyone not named Michigan and Ohio State over the last three seasons. Pretty good!
Against Ohio State and Michigan? 0-5. Oops! Kind of a problem!
I say “kind of” a problem because that’s the truth. Now, it’s only an issue this year if Penn State stumbles against a non-OSU/Michigan opponent, which they rarely do. It was a much bigger issue during the four-team College Football Playoff era, but that time has come and gone. No program benefitted more directly from the Playoff tripling in size than Penn State. They will be present and accounted for at that 12-seat table for the foreseeable future.
Now, if I were a Penn State fan, it would stick in my craw in perpetuity that Franklin never got the team into the four-team iteration. They were always standing there outside the velvet rope, and the bouncer never let them through. Mainly because the bouncer was always wearing scarlet and gray or maize and blue, and had a vested interest in keeping them out.
Penn State is going to make it to this year’s playoff. They won’t be getting a bye; they will, however, almost certainly get a home game. They’ll have a chance to avenge, on some level, what happened against Ohio State.
Question is, why would anyone believe they’ll actually take advantage of it? This program has as many top-five wins as Vanderbilt since 2000 (one). The team Penn State meets in the playoff will likely be the 10th-ranked team in the country. Franklin is 3-17 against Top-10 teams in his career. It isn’t pretty and it never changes.
This is what Penn State is. Franklin deserves credit for getting them to this point, and blame for not getting them beyond this point. He coaches small in the biggest moments; Tyler Warren, Penn State’s best offensive player and the reason they had a goal-to-go situation with a chance to tie Ohio State, didn’t touch the ball on the last four offensive snaps. That’s on the coach!
Three straight goal line runs with a lineman in motion, and then a messy passing play. It was like Franklin tried to prove, on first through third downs, that he and his program had physically caught up with Ohio State. They didn’t need any gimmicks, they could just line up and be better, man for man, than the Buckeyes. But they weren’t. And then, with one down left, they didn’t have anything else in their arsenal to dial up.
And then, to drive home the point that there’s still a gulf between the two programs, and probably always will be, Ohio State promptly ran a quarterback sneak from the one-yard-line that gained five yards, then ripped off several first downs by imposing their will on the Nittany Lions. It was a physical domination that was almost worse than the goal-line stand.
The Nittany Lions will have another crack at this; they’ll be one of the 12 left standing at the end. I’d wager a lot of money on that. I’d also wager a lot of money that, until they prove me wrong, the final 12 is as far as they’ll get.
Penn State under James Franklin never got into the exclusive club; they just lasted long enough to see the club relax its rules for membership. If that’s a victory for the program, it’s a hollow one, at best.
Uh, Pitt?
If Penn State’s result was disappointing because it was so predictable, what happened to Pitt against Southern Methodist several hours later was a massive letdown precisely because expectations, never usually a companion of the program, had just started to creep in.
This might be a cold comfort to Penn State fans, but at least their team was in the game for 58 minutes against Ohio State. Pitt was competitive for a little more than 58 seconds against SMU. If Penn State’s problem is akin to that of Sisyphus, a program pushing a boulder that never crests the hill, Pitt was just trying to figure how to get the rock moving, only to have it immediately roll backwards and squash them.
Pat Narduzzi’s team completely no-showed against SMU, and it was the defense, supposedly his calling card, that led the charge to the bottom. A missed tackle on the second play of the game turned a modest gain into a big one, and the Mustangs were off and running and never looked back.
The 48-25 final score does no justice whatsoever to how lopsided the game was. SMU could have scored 70 points had they so desired. I’m not sure Pitt could have put up 17 if the Mustangs were actually engaged on defense for all 60 minutes.
It’s one thing to be close to the teams you’re chasing, only to continually come up small in big games. That still stinks, but at least you can try to convince yourself every year that things will be different. The separation is a matter of degree. It’s another thing to roll into a road stadium at 7-0, riding high and harboring dreams no one could have fathomed before the season, only to have your opponent so thoroughly outclass you that it looks like they’re playing a different sport.
The Panthers never knew what hit them, and what makes the loss especially dispiriting is that SMU not only better at virtually every position on the field, but also like a much better-coached team. Kade Bell’s offense, the toast of the offseason and early season, looked limp and impotent. Nothing Pitt got came easily. They lost at the line of scrimmage, and couldn’t generate any explosive plays when it mattered.
Eli Holstein looked lost and unsure of himself for the third-straight game, and what I and others thought might be a blip against California has now turned into a full-blown trend. I’m not sure if it’s Bell’s offense not getting people open in the passing game, or Holstein not seeing them (probably a little from Column A and Column B, to be honest), but suddenly no one’s worried about Alliance 412 being able to cough up enough money to keep Holstein in 2025.
SMU was Pitt’s biggest test of the season, by far, and the Panthers failed it miserably. It wasn’t just the kind of loss that derails hopes of a longshot College Football Playoff berth coming to fruition, it was the kind of loss that makes you wonder how much progress has actually been made. One of Narduzzi’s bigger strong points was that his teams tended to show up well in big games, even if they didn’t win. It looked like the Panthers never arrived in Dallas for this one.
Perhaps most troublingly, it looked like it wouldn’t have mattered much if they did. Pitt was probably ahead of schedule, but what SMU did to them reinforced one thing: No matter how encouraging the first seven games of the season were, the Panthers have a very long way to go to get to anything approaching college football’s upper echelon.
SMU was supposed to be a prove-it game for Pitt. The only thing that the Panthers proved was that they weren’t ready for prime time, literally or figuratively.