Three takeaways from Penn State football’s 40-36 road win vs. Rutgers
Penn State ended its regular season with a 40-36 win over Rutgers on Saturday. The Nittany Lions are now 6-6 in a season that was expected to carry into the College Football Playoff.
Here are three takeaways from Saturday’s matchup.
PSU bowl eligibility comes as a surprise
The Nittany Lions needed to win three games in a row to end the season to make a bowl game, and Saturday’s win over the Scarlet Knights sealed the deal. This team was left for dead when it dropped to 3-6 with a loss to Indiana, but managed to battle back under interim head coach Terry Smith to get the six wins necessary to make the postseason.
The offense greatly improved, and the defense did enough over the stretch to get the job done, which is a credit to everyone involved — coaching staff and players. Now it’s a matter of determining which bowl the team will play in and who will play from a roster laden with draft talent and potential opt-outs.
This is what PSU’s offense was supposed to be
Penn State got whatever it wanted on offense Saturday, mostly because it was dominant on the ground — and that opened up the passing game for redshirt freshman quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer. That type of game, one with 509 total yards of Penn State offense, is what PSU was supposed to do to everyone this year.
The Nittany Lions were supposed to lean on teams in the trenches and wear them out while they gave the ball to Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton and let them go to work. While it has mostly been Allen who has carried the load since James Franklin was fired as head coach on Oct. 12, Singleton has still contributed. And he did the same against the Scarlet Knights, making plays in the running game whenever he got into space. Singleton finished with 86 rushing yards while setting the career school record for TDs, which complemented Allen’s 226 yards on the day.
It’s far too late to matter in the grand scheme of things, but it’s nice to know the projections for what the offense could have been weren’t completely off base.
Defensive struggles bring DC Knowles into question
There might not have been a coach on Penn State’s staff more likely to return next season than defensive coordinator Jim Knowles. He’s highly paid and has proven he can coach in big games, and the Nittany Lions’ defense has shown improvement in less important games over the last few weeks.
But Saturday was a disaster for the defense. The Nittany Lions couldn’t tackle, couldn’t cover and all-around couldn’t stop a Rutgers team that scored only nine points last week against Ohio State. Knowles can’t be blamed entirely for the performance — the players need to execute better — but this is the kind of matchup even average coordinators routinely excel in even without this much of a talent advantage.
That doesn’t mean Knowles isn’t a good defensive coordinator or that one game should outweigh his entire body of work. But there’s also no denying that this season was largely a failure for a defense that could have been one of the best in the country.
This story was originally published November 29, 2025 at 6:57 PM.
