Penn State gains relief after win, wonders what might have been [opinion]

EAST LANSING, Mich. – They celebrated Saturday night like they won a championship that they expected to win when all of this began.

They carried their coach on their shoulders when it was over. They raised a clunky trophy and posed for photos with it. They banged lockers in the bowels of Spartan Stadium.

All that after Penn State’s 28-10 victory over hapless Michigan State for the Land Grant Trophy in a game that shouldn’t have been as hard as it looked.

Who could blame them?

They had just endured the longest 63 days of their athletic careers, through loss after loss after loss after loss after loss after loss. Six in a row, five by a total of 16 points.

Were they relieved? It was on their faces.

“Yeah,” defensive end Dani Dennis-Sutton said, “it just feels good not to be on a losing streak.”

Perhaps after waking up Sunday they’ll think about what went wrong this season and why it took them until mid-November to resemble the team everyone thought they’d be.

They played their two best games of the season against the Spartans and the previous week against No. 2 Indiana.

“We knew this is what we were capable of,” safety Zakee Wheatley said. “We just had to display it.”

The Nittany Lions limited Michigan State to 229 total yards (172 after the first play), sacked Alessio Milivojevic five times (two by Dennis-Sutton) and shut down talented wide receiver Nick Marsh.

It’s hard to believe it was the same defense that blew a coverage against Oregon in the second overtime; allowed UCLA to light it up for 42 points and 269 rushing yards; let Northwestern march 75 yards for the game-winning touchdown; and allowed hobbled Iowa quarterback Mark Gronowski rush for 130 yards and two TDs.

“Right now it’s just starting to click,” Wheatley said. “We’re starting to play for each other and it’s starting to look like it. I knew everything was going to click at one point. I didn’t know exactly when it was going to be, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks ago.

“But it happened today, so all we can do is enjoy it and appreciate it.”

On offense, Penn State finally began to throw the ball downfield against Indiana and then Michigan State after a seemingly endless assortment of horizontal passes in the first eight games.

Ethan Grunkemeyer wasn’t asked to do much against the Spartans. But he made the prettiest deep pass of the season by a Lions quarterback when he hit Devonte Ross in stride for a 75-yard touchdown in the second quarter, the longest Penn State completion in two years.

“It felt good to finally break through on something like that,” Grunkemeyer said. “We saw something we liked on film. We had it on the call sheet. We got the look we wanted and executed it well. Devonte ran a great route. I just put it out there for him.”

The play forced Michigan State to respect the pass and not stack the line of scrimmage to stop the run. Kaytron Allen rushed 25 times for a career-high 181 yards, including 106 in the fourth quarter, and Nick Singleton ran for 56 as Penn State finished with a season-high 240.

“I thought our offensive line controlled the line of scrimmage,” said interim head coach Terry Smith, who picked up his first win. “They dominated the line of scrimmage and the game.”

The guys up front played like they were expected to play before the season, like they did in the final eight games last season when the Lions gashed Oregon, SMU, Boise State and Notre Dame on the ground in the postseason.

“We’re gonna play Penn State football,” Smith said. “This was an old-school, Big Ten game. We dominated up front. We threw the ball when necessary. It was efficient.”

It was a glimpse of what this season could have been, even if it was against a team on a seven-game losing streak that’s expected to see its coach lose his job.

The Lions avoided tying a school record for consecutive losses, stayed in the hunt for a bowl berth and finally got a win. They nearly forgot what it tasted like.

“It’s half relief, half excitement,” Wheatley said. “It’s really a bunch of feelings right now.”

Including wondering why it took so long to show what they can do.

Source: Berkshire mont