Saturday was a special day for my family and me. I've taken my older daughters to a handful of Penn State games apiece spread out across the Midwest, but my youngest has only seen the Nittany Lions in at the old Ryan Field. Until Saturday. We got up early and made the pilgrimage eight hours eastward, leaving a few hours before sunrise and ending our night in a Youngstown hotel around 1:30am. It was a long day. And it was a magical day sharing this loved experience with all three of my girls (my wife opted for a day of botanical gardens and relaxation, a strong choice for her).
And then the Penn State offense got involved, the fourth quarter happened, and instead of singing a celebratory anthem along with the Jonas Brothers, we found ourselves feeling gobsmacked that the season was somehow flipped on its head by Luke Fickell's lowly Wisconsin Badgers. Much more than that happened, of course, but we'll start with a quick recap of things that stood out from the football contest itself.
Game Thoughts on Wisconsin
- The Wisconsin defense was pretty good! They aren't exactly loaded up with star players, but they're tough along the defensive line and their linebackers played responsible football. That said...
- Their secondary got beat deep all night. Not ideal if you're Wisconsin, but they handled everything else in front of them quite well. Still, getting whooped deep is a great way to play losing football.
- Wisconsin QB Colton Joseph was awful. It's difficult to describe just how poorly he threw the ball, but how's this: with seven minutes left in in the 4th quarter, Joseph was 11/27 for 94 yards and three interceptions. You could argue that his passing yielded 19 net yards and -7 net points if you fold in the interception returns. And this was a dead-on accurate portrayal of Joseph's passing acumen on the day, save for his beautiful touchdown ball to the back corner of the endzone to Eugene Hilton Jr. on Wisconsin's penultimate drive.
- Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, over the six minutes that followed, Joseph went 7/11 for 141 yards and two touchdowns. Wowzers.
- Jacob Harris made the two biggest plays for the Wisconsin offense. Obviously his 72-yard game-winning touchdown with less than 100 seconds remaining got primary attention, but his incredible leaping catch at the end of the first half set up the Badgers' first touchdown, too. Kudos to Harris for making those plays. Last year, Harris played every game for Bowling Green and amassed 182 yards across 19 grabs; he managed 105 yards on five catches in Happy Valley.
- Wisconsin handled a tough -- but not elite -- crowd on Saturday very poorly, committing five false starts, including one false start on each fourth quarter touchdown drive.
- Taken together, the Wisconsin offense was abysmal and the Wisconsin defense made tons of catastrophic mistakes. However, inexplicably, PSU couldn't punish them. The defense could be pretty good, especially against the run, but the offense is so bad that it won't matter, particularly because the Wisconsin OL is truly bad; that sentence feels strange to type.
- I fully expect that this team ends up with either a 5-7 or 6-6 record, getting Luke Fickell fired.
Game Thoughts on Penn State - Positives
- Oh boy. Let's start with the good things because that won't take very long.
- Carson Hansen looked bad starting the game with four carries in the first quarter, and RB coach Savon Huggins used a quick hook; Hansen didn't have another carry. Huggins instead featured James Peoples, who looked considerably better than Hansen, with a sprinkling of Quinton Martin mixed in for his explosiveness.
- Despite having a big lead, then a smaller lead, then a deficit, offensive coordinator Taylor Mouser kept dialing up deep shots. Whether they were designed as kill shots or game-saving plays, Mouser put QB Rocco Becht in position to make big plays. There's a narrative that PSU called an ultra-conservative game, but that simply isn't true. Mouser called a sufficiently aggressive game. The team just couldn't make it matter.
- Josiah Zayas. What an exciting young player who made a great play.
- Daryus Dixson and Tony Rojas both starred in coverage and both also came away with well-deserved interceptions.
- The primary linebackers -- Rojas and Kooper Ebel -- were both very impressive on the whole. Even Alex Tatsch delivered a punishing tackle.
Game Thoughts on Penn State - Negatives
- There's a lot to pull from here. It has to start with Becht. After having his way with PSU's non-conference opponents, Becht looked completely overwhelmed by Wisconsin's likely Big Ten league-average defensive unit. He missed on so many throws that they're hard to track. Of course, the two biggest that stood out were deep shots to wide open Brett Eskildsen, both of which Becht underthrew badly. He also overthrew Eskildsen early. Becht also took an inexcusable sack on the game's final drive. Even a checkdown would've meant a 10-yard swing that could've kept the offense on schedule instead of feeling desperate. Becht's total line is horrendous -- 12/29 for 114 yards with a pick -- but the low completion percentage wasn't some mirage of the desperation drive. Becht entered that final drive with a line of 10/19 for 89 yards. Speaking of that pick, Becht had three different passes tipped at the line. Bad. There were plenty of plays to be made in this game; Becht missed them all.
- The offense, as a whole, was almost impossibly bad. The team scored 20 points, but the offense had almost nothing to do with that, producing one true scoring drive. The scores:
- A field goal drive that began at the Wisconsin 40 -- nearly already in field goal range -- after a suffocating drive from the defense and a strong punt return from Zay Robinson. The offense got to 2nd down at the 1, then lost three yards, threw a pass into a DE's arms, and kicked a FG.
- The Zayas pick-six.
- A three-play, 11-yard touchdown drive set up by Dixson's interception return. This was a good job of converting the short field into a touchdown.
- A 13-play, 56-yard field goal drive that took seven minutes. This one had two big plays with a pass to Sowell and a timely scramble from Becht.
- There is no pass rush. The concern was that Max Granville would be desperately missed, but even I didn't think that it would be this bad. Wisconsin's offensive tackles were both terrible, yet Ikenna Ezeogu, Yvan Kemajou, Alex McPherson, and Caleb Bacon were entirely incapable of making life difficult on Joseph at all. We're not just talking about sacks; there was effectively no pressure at all.
- Defensive Coordinator D'Anton Lynn employs his defensive tackles much differently than Brent Pry, Manny Diaz, and Tom Allen before him, opting for hulking, run-stuffing DTs that lack pass rush ability. Those DTs did their jobs for three quarters, and then completely fell apart in the 4th quarter. In the 4th quarter alone, the defense surrendered the following rushes:
- A 12-yard scramble from Joseph
- A 5-yard scramble for Joseph to set up a 4th and inches that he subsequently converted
- A 17-yard gash from Darrion Dupree
- A 13-yard interior run from Dupree
- A 6-yard interior run from Dupree
- The Nittany offense produced four straight three-and-outs in the 4th quarter of this game.
- It did seem like Eskildsen could've fought back for some of the balls that Becht underthrew to him. He's clearly a speedy athlete who isn't a great receiver.
- Matt Campbell took three minutes to decide to go for it on 4th and 1 at his own 38 to start the 4th quarter, didn't like the look, and called timeout with 21 seconds remaining on the play clock instead of (i) just going for it, or (ii) rushing out his punt unit to kick the ball away. Burning a second half timeout to save five yards is bad. Doing it off of the end-of-quarter break is inexcusable.
Nittany Football Problems That Are Bigger Than Just the PSU-Wisconsin Game
- Again, there's a lot here.
- There are two huge problems with the collection of players that Campbell brought with him from Iowa State: (i) they don't seem to play well together, and (ii) many of them are much more limited that we even feared.
- Marcus Neal was expected to be a veteran leader with subpar coverage skills and strong run defense. Instead, his run defense has been fine and he absolutely can't cover.
- Becht cannot connect with Eskildsen, who is fast but can't play the ball.
- Hansen is unplayable and clearly RB4 at this point.
- LG Trevor Buhr was largely responsible for giving up the brutal sack on the final series, passing off the Wisconsin DT to nobody.
- Numerous players that came over with Campbell don't play meaningful roles at all or truly don't play. LB Cael Brezina got three snaps on Saturday.
- TE Gabe Burkle has been terrible; perhaps he's still injured?
- Caleb Bacon is playing DE out of necessity, so perhaps some grace is due here, but he was terrible.
- DT Alijah Carnell got five snaps.
- Campbell had a couple of days to think about Saturday's catastrophe before attending his Monday press conference, yet he still ended up in front of the press corps and repeatedly explained that he chose to sit on the ball at the end of the first half and punt on 4th and 1 out of fear of something bad happening. Um, what?
- So much has been made about the failures of the Penn State offense in the 4th quarter. That's fair because they were dreadful late. But it wildly understates just how poorly the offense played for the entire game. The offense dropped from 14th in SP+ to 28th in one mid-season week -- that's hard to do!
Nittany Non-Football Problems That Are Bigger Than Just the PSU-Wisconsin Game
- The Beaver Stadium renovation is terrible. It's not bad; it's terrible. The sideline seating used to slowly slope up 110 rows from the field level to the back of the sideline upper sections, creating the effect of one giant section of fans; some were closer to the field, some further, but everyone was in the same area. The suites will surely be nice if you're inside them, but the cost of adding the suites is that the West upper deck sections are now terrible seats. The West side upper deck fans are far away and terrifyingly steep. As a result, nobody wants to sit there. The atmosphere will suffer.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It's not about making the College Football Playoff. There was a world where Penn State went 10-2 this season, with losses to two out of the three mid-season matchups with USC, Michigan, and Washington, and still missed the Playoff; that would've been tough. We're well past that! Bowl eligibility is on the line at this point. The things that Penn State does poorly -- rush the passer, have Marcus Neal cover a speedy player, run block, and throw to anyone other than Koby Howard -- is what every opposing team will key in on the rest of the way and there doesn't appear to be a ready-made answer in the Lasch Building.
This team isn't terrible. But they're just not very good either.
What does that mean? Frankly, Campbell's tenure is already at five-alarm fire territory. The expectations for success in 2026 are fundamentally different than they were even a decade ago. Penn State is spending something in the neighborhood of $30M on this year's roster and $700M on the Beaver Stadium improvements. Embarrassing losses back athletic departments into corners, and PSU AD Pat Kraft is already in the corner, having eaten nearly $50M on the James Franklin contract (before the wildly-reduced buyout) to hunt for a championship. Kraft cannot afford to be patient with Campbell if he scuffles to the tune of four or five losses a year; if he sticks with Campbell too long, Kraft himself will hit the unemployment line.
Campbell was in the tricky spot of needing a 10+ win season in 2026 in his first year in State College. Why? The 2026 schedule is as favorable as it can possibly be in the modern Big Ten. In 2027, Nittany gets Michigan and Washington at home and takes trips to Wisconsin (whatever), Illinois (can be tough), Indiana (yikes), and Oregon (YIKES!). There are a number of expected losses in that bunch. 2028 is dramatically worse with home games against the current top five teams in the Big Ten (Ohio State, Indiana, Iowa, Oregon, and UCLA) and road trips to Nebraska and USC. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Penn State go 6-6 in 2026, 7-5 in 2027, and 5-7 in 2028. If that happens, Campbell won't make it to year four.
Is this a huge overreaction? Could be! But in the modern era of college football, coaches at big-time programs won't get four years to put things together. Not with the Portal, not with the dollars being spent on the rosters, and certainly not with Penn State needing to continue growing the program to pay for the expenditures already incurred. It appears dramatically more likely that Campbell suffers a losing season and gets fired before year four than it does that he ever makes the Playoff.
Now, to be fair, I was all the way out on James Franklin in 2015 and especially so in September 2016 after watching his team lose by 39 in Ann Arbor. We all know what happened next: the team flipped the switch, ripped off nine straight wins, and entered a new era of excellence, albeit one that existed permanently a tier below the nation's elite.
Could Campbell get there? Honestly, I don't think so. Campbell's path to success involves coaching up and developing somewhat talented players whereas Franklin's path involved recruiting elite talent and hiring top assistants. Campbell somehow features the same gameday shortcomings as Franklin but without any history of recruiting at a top level or the northeast/DMV connections that fueled Franklin's success on the trail.
It only just began. But it's over, baby.
