Penn State football gets its season back on track despite loss to Ohio State
Penn State head coach James Franklin stood with his arms crossed on the sideline at Ohio Stadium on Saturday and turned his head toward the scoreboard where the game clock ticked down.
4:58, 4:57, 4:56.
The clock continued to run as Penn State wide receivers coach Taylor Stubblefield looked up to it.
4:53, 4:52. 4:51.
Neither coach had much sway in how Penn State football’s 33-24 loss to Ohio State played out from there. The Buckeyes extended their lead from six to nine in the drive that ensued and all but sealed the Nittany Lions’ fate.
The Nittany Lions were disappointed with the result and the lost opportunity, but the way the defeat happened is a sign the team, under Franklin’s leadership, has found itself back on the tracks after the season appeared close to coming off the rails following last week’s 20-18 9OT loss to Illinois.
Redshirt senior defensive end Arnold Ebiketie believes the team bounced back in the right direction, even in defeat.
“I think we did a really good job, playing them,” Ebiketie said. “We fought hard out there. It’s unfortunate, but I think there’s a lot of good things that we did. I feel like moving forward, if we attack every single game the way we did today, we have a pretty good chance of winning all the games that we have on the schedule.”
The redshirt senior saw what was evident throughout Saturday night’s game. Penn State played with an effort and clear identity that it lacked in the prior week. It quickly made the Illinois game appear as the outlier rather than the new norm.
The new identity wasn’t the result of a change in style or an alteration to what the team did throughout the week.
Rather, it was how the team prepared prior to the game against the Buckeyes that made the difference when the Nittany Lions finally took the field.
“I don’t think we did anything different,” Ebiketie said. “It was more so about being focused, paying attention to the details and executing the game plan the same way we have been all along this season.”
Franklin saw much of that change in the team and believed there was plenty to take from the loss to the Buckeyes, but the biggest difference in his eyes was the health of the team’s quarterback, redshirt senior Sean Clifford.
Clifford looked like a different player on the field Saturday night than he did a week earlier. He had more velocity on his passes and looked more comfortable moving around. That resulted in an impressive 361 passing yards and a touchdown on 35-of-52 passing, although he did throw an interception.
The redshirt senior was much improved three weeks after suffering an undisclosed injury that knocked him out of the team’s game against Iowa in the second quarter, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He was brief with his response when asked what he wants to learn from the game.
“I want to win the rest of the year,” Clifford said. “I want to win. I want to go 1-0 next week. That’s what I wanna do.”
The loss might be chalked up as a moral victory to some but, like Clifford, Franklin won’t be categorizing the game in that way.
The Penn State head coach was happy with his team’s effort — which he said hasn’t changed from week to week with the team playing hard “all year long” — but said there was more to the game than just his team’s will to win.
There were too many issues that arose that prevented Penn State from ultimately taking home the win.
“I’m glad we played hard,” Franklin said. “I thought there’s gonna be a bunch of positive things off that tape to learn from and grow from. But there’s some critical mistakes that we gotta eliminate if we wanna win consistently. I’m glad that we came and competed and did some good things and gave ourselves a chance to win. But at the end of the day we didn’t get it done.”
The loss to Ohio State is just that — a loss. But Penn State will have more opportunities this season to knock off some of the best teams in the country.
The Nittany Lions still have to play one-loss Michigan at home and head on the road to face off with the undefeated Michigan State Spartans.
There will be opportunities to earn wins that a week ago seemed like surefire losses.
Penn State now looks like a team with an identity that can play with any team in the country, no matter how talented.
That’s a far cry from a week ago, when it stood on the precipice of disaster.
