PSU point-counterpoint: Can the season be salvaged if the Nittany Lions go 8-4? With so much roster turnover, ending strong won’t mean much
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Yeah, sorry not sorry, but I'm out on this Penn State football season, and I don't think Matt Campbell and the Lions can salvage anything by beating a bunch of mediocre opponents left on the schedule.
When you have a sport in college football that has resorted to hiring temp employees to be independent contractors, why should any of us care about those guys once they've already failed to accomplish the primary task at hand?
I don't really care about this Iowa State East team. You can get angry at me for being blunt, but that's exactly how history will view this season -- as the Iowa State East Cyclones proving they're not good enough for the Big Ten.
But what about building something for the future, you might ask?
OK, now you've got me. Give me some wiggle room, because I'm going to bury the lede here a little.
I talk a lot on my radio show about Wisconsin basketball. Back in 2015, the Badgers made it to the national championship game, led by Frank Kaminsky, the national player of the year. Kaminsky was a senior, and all told, that Wisconsin team had nine players who would play their entire college careers with the Badgers -- eight who played four years and one other who played three.
That is what college sports has always been about to me. Get guys into your program, let them grow together, learn the system, add a piece here or there, and then you hope to win big as they gain experience playing together.
That formula worked perfectly for system-oriented Wisconsin basketball. It was also about the only way Penn State basketball could ever really hope to achieve success, by keeping guys year over year and building team chemistry (think Joe Crispin and Talor Battle eras).
College sports don't exist like that any longer.
Instead of building your program through recruiting and retention, today it's all about going out and buying pieces in hopes of assembling a free agent championship.
What gets lost in doing that is the idea that each season builds upon the next, and the next, and so on. In the past, if you finished strong, it gave you something to build on with that group of players returning next year.
This is the major reason why I believe the rest of this season doesn't matter much for Penn State. Because many of the key players on this team will be gone next year, to be replaced by another group of free agents, so it's not like winning these five remaining games will carry over much for 2027.
You'll have a new QB, one who probably isn't even in the program right now. Linebacker Tony Rojas will probably be gone, either to the NFL or as a high-priced transfer. Receiver Koby Howard may command a huge transfer amount, so why should he return with so much uncertainty at quarterback?
Campbell already has shown he can't win a big game at Penn State. Winning five games against weak competition won't exactly give me confidence he can win big games next year with a different cast of characters.
The last coach won 10 games a year against lesser teams and still got fired because he couldn't win the biggest games. If that's the kind of program Penn State wants to have, then don't expect people to care about these lesser games once the season is already lost.
Cory Giger hosts the Blue & White Wrapup postgame show following each PSU game on 101.3 and 107.1 Jack FM.