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Penn State ended the season as Rose Bowl champions at 11-2 and in good position to challenge for the 2023 Big Ten championship and a berth in the College Football Playoff.
And what the Nittany Lions have accomplished on the field will help them off the field, where the ability to raise money for Name Image and Likeness will be needed to keep the current roster intact and continue building on it.
If you've followed college football for a long time, chances are you don't like the two things dominating the conversation in college sports these days: NIL and the transfer portal.
I'm not against an NIL program that has guidelines. Plenty of families have struggled to make road trips to see their sons (or daughters) whose respective coaches have gotten rich.
So if a local car dealer wants to pay a player to do a commercial, or give him (or her) use of a car or strike a deal for a weekly pizza dinner, so be it.
The problem arises without guidance from a governing body, such as the inept NCAA that allowed this train to roar out of the station without any brakes.
NIL deals are more than cars and pizza. They're being used as lucrative recruiting carrots to one-up the other guy.
During bowl season, James Franklin and others weighed in on what is often being referred to as "the wild west."
"There's major concerns with what's going on in college football right now," Franklin said. "There's really no guardrails. There's not a lot of guidance or governance, and it's concerning."
Franklin supports NIL, but leading up to national signing day on Dec. 21, he said, "Some of the (recruiting) conversations happening are crazy. It got down to the 11th hour, and it got as crazy as anything I've seen in my 26 years of doing this.
"We have to come up with a solution for college athletics and specifically football."
Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said he understood two SEC schools offered North Carolina quarterback Derek Maye $5 million to transfer.
Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher said the current climate is "ruining college football."
Ohio State coach Ryan Day made news over the summer when he told Buckeye boosters that he needed an estimated $13 million to keep his roster intact.
Compounding the issue is the transfer portal, which allows a player to shop himself.
Nittany Lion receivers coach Taylor Stubblefield said rumors are rampant of financial promises.
"You hear stories all over the place from horse ranches to seven figures," he said. "You don't know what is true and what's not."
"The problem with all of it is there's no consistency in rules, and when you get into the portal, there's so much tampering going on, it's utterly ridiculous," Fisher said.
After the last men's college basketball season, more than 1500 players were in the transfer portal. Some teams lost nearly their entire squads.
There are reasons to transfer, of course. Some who aren't developing into the players they'd hoped to be, or found the level too high, or just didn't like their original choice, fine.
But the trend indicates too many players are jumping at the first sign of unhappiness and are unwilling to give it a legitimate chance for a couple of years.
Unregulated transfer teaches the wrong message at a time -- college -- when kids should be learning how to cope and work through adversity.
It's also wreaking havoc with high school prospects who are taking a back seat as college staffs first scramble through lists upon lists in the portal.
"With the transfer portal ... and things the NCAA comes up with, I think probably, in theory, make sense," Franklin said. "As always, I don't know if there's enough conversation going on with the actual practitioners."
Franklin said players considering a transfer sometime want immediate answers. Such as: "You get a phone call at 12 o'clock at night, and he's ready to jump, and you better have the answer because now, if you don't give him the answer, he wakes up in the morning, and he has second thoughts because you haven't given him a direct answer."
Quarterbacks are the most mobile of the players in the portal and the beneficiaries of NIL.
"You may start a true freshman and have five quarterbacks on your roster," Franklin said, "but after the season ends, your room is going to change dramatically."
Franklin was frustrated with Penn State's last administration concerning its tentative embrace of NIL -- "we were way behind" -- but believes new president Neeli Bendapudi and athletic director Pat Kraft "have hit the ground running."
They have focused on NIL, facilities and staff retention.
"I think we've made up a lot of ground in a short period of time," Franklin said. "But we still have work to do if we're going to be competing and just not in football but all 31 sports. We're going to solve this problem like we've always done and that's with the power of the Penn State brand and also the power of the largest living alumni network. And it's going to take all of us."
The CFP expansion looming in 2024 is expected to bring more parity. TCU, with 13 transfers, is an example of that.
In the last 50 years, Penn State has played TCU twice (1971 and '78) and won by a combined 124-14.
In this new era of NIL and the transfer portal -- even if we don't like it -- TCU will play for the national championship on Monday night.
With their foundation, past and present, that should give the Nittany Lions even more hope.
Especially if the NCAA gets around to creating some actual regulations.
Rudel can be reached at 814-946-7527 or nrudel@altoonamirror.com.