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Confidence is an amazing thing in sports, the kind of thing that simply cannot be quantified.
Having covered professional baseball for 25 years, I can unequivocally say that confidence is paramount for any player to succeed. The game is just too hard and too fast for a baseball player to achieve any success if he's not in the right head space.
Football is a little different, because it's such a physical and reactionary kind of game. You can just go out and let your physical skills try to overpower the other guy.
Having said that, when you're talking about college football, you're talking about a whole bunch of 18- to 22-year-old young men. They generally are supremely confident at that age, sometimes bordering on flat out arrogance, and will remain so as long as things are going their way.
But once they face a good bit of adversity -- sometimes for the first time in their athletic careers -- the confidence level can dip in a big way really quickly.
I think that's what happened to last year's Penn State football team. They suffered a kick in the teeth with the overtime loss at Indiana -- a game I will always believe the Nittany Lions actually won but the refs blew the call on the 2-point conversion -- and then had to go out and play Ohio State the following week.
All of the goals for the season were gone after week two.
So, things spiraled out of control to 0-5, including the Lions looking anything but confident in a week three blowout loss against Maryland.
Fast forward to this season, and the Lions picked up a great win at Wisconsin in the opener. They did not play a great game by any stretch and were lucky in some ways that the Badgers kept shooting themselves in the foot, but all that mattered after that game was the scoreboard.
At 0-1 last year, Penn State's confidence level was already in the toilet.
At 1-0 this year, that confidence level was sky high.
Imagine, then, what a win over Auburn would do?
If Penn State can open the season 3-0 with victories over Wisconsin and Auburn, this group would be unbelievably confident. And that confidence, I believe, could indeed help PSU become a legitimate College Football Playoff contender.
Now, is Wisconsin all that good? Maybe not. And is Auburn all that good? We'll see.
But what I'm talking about here isn't necessarily if those teams are great. It's that the players on this Penn State team would be feeling so great about a 3-0 start that it could carry this group a lot further than anyone may have imagined.
That happened in 2005 with a PSU team that wasn't expected to do much but then built supreme confidence with the win over Ohio State. It also happened in 2016, with another monumental win over the Buckeyes.
Momentum is a powerful thing in college athletics, because again, you're dealing with young people and the ebbs and flows of their confidence.
There are still major challenges ahead on the schedule, notably trips to Iowa and Ohio State. And right now, I still think Penn State loses both of those games.
But if the Lions get past Auburn this week and have their 3-0 start, don't be surprised if the gigantic confidence boost carries them to heights that few of us expected this season.
Cory Giger is a Penn State beat writer for DK Pittsburgh Sports and host of "Sports Central" weekday afternoons from 4-5 on WRTA. Contact him at cgsports12@aol.com.