Is this Penn State season a success?

PASADENA, Calif. — A damp Saturday morning down in the Arroyo Seco, as Penn State football players showed up in game jerseys for media day, just as Utah players had a little earlier.

One Nittany Lions player walking into a tent outside the stadium uttered words you don’t expect at the Rose Bowl … “I’m cold.”

Like a fall day in Big Ten country instead of another perfect day in sunny Southern California. But Penn State players still sounded genuinely excited to be here.

“They roll out the red carpet for you, literally,” Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford said.

The setting stays special, whatever the temperature. The stakes are plenty big, as the Nittany Lions try to win the Rose Bowl for the first time in 28 seasons.

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Going in, let’s bounce this around a bit … is this a successful season for Penn State? Isn’t 10 wins already getting you over that bar? Isn’t a No. 9 national AP ranking proof enough?

It gets you over the good season bar, by any measure.

“It’s hard to get 10 wins,” Nittany Lions safety Ji’Ayir Brown said. “It’s not easy to win. In 2020, I figured that out real early.”

Penn State was 4-5 that pandemic season, then 7-6 last season. Of course this is a good season, the 25th 10-win season in school history.

“To accomplish this,” Brown said. “To be at the Rose Bowl to have all this attention. It’s been great.”

But has it been a great season? Obviously, not so fast. Let’s argue that a victory Monday over the 7th-ranked Utes is the bar for greatness this time around.

It’s not Penn State’s fault that none of the 10 teams they beat are currently ranked. In fact, that might be the most impressive thing about this season. The Nittany Lions overlooked nobody.

“Ten wins — not too many teams across the country are doing that,” said Penn State defensive tackle PJ Mustipher. “There have been weeks when they’ve lost to teams they really shouldn’t lose to.”

The frustration for Penn State fans obviously comes with the losses, that Dear Old State isn’t winning the big ones. Never mind that the definition of a big game in sports is too often the game you lose … Penn State decided back in 1993 that the school wanted to be judged against the likes of Ohio State and Michigan.

This year, 0-2. (Or 0-1 and 0-1 in James Franklin speak.)

I still take the position that if the two teams that beat you both make college football’s four-team playoff, you can’t be judged too harshly, especially when you played at Michigan and still had a lead against Ohio State with nine minutes left in the game.

But the winners earned them fully and the losses left PSU out of the national title picture. Leaving October, Penn State was 6-2, 3-2 in the conference. Yet the season went on.

Most pivotal win of the season?

“You know what’s funny, I think the most pivotal is our two losses,” Mustipher said Saturday. “I think our two losses really helped shape our season because we had to learn. When you’re doing a lot of winning and you’re having success, you don’t really grow as much as when you’re not experiencing the success and really failing, you know what I mean? We experienced that failure and we learned and grew from it.”

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They talk about the Minnesota game being a big one, since it was a trap game between Michigan and Ohio State. Penn State won 45-14 over a team that ended up 9-4.

“The most important win had to be the first one, against Purdue,” Brown said. “I feel like that one right there got the ball rolling, kind of identified who we were and who we could be. A lot of key plays, a lot of plays that happened in that game where it could have went left, it could have went right.”

And Purdue ended up in the Big Ten title game. Brown was right. An alternate ending instead of a 35-31 road win would have made this whole season feel different from the jump.

What about the head coach? I asked James Franklin what’s the bar personally for him to consider a successful season.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s necessarily for me to determine,” Franklin said. “We just want to be 1-0 in this game. We want to win this game against a really good opponent. That’s for other people to discuss and talk about. The things that we talk about inside our program is obviously, again, making sure our guys are handling themselves academically and putting themselves in the best position to take care of themselves and their families for the next 50 years. It’s being great in our community and making a positive impact in our community, and it’s going out and playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played week in and week out on a consistent basis.”

That’s about what you’d expect Franklin to say. Maybe what he should say. But since the head coach ceded this territory to us: Yes, 10 wins is successful. But 11 wins would make for a 84.6 percentage and Penn State has only done better than that percentage twice since 1986.

So good already, which shouldn’t be taken for granted. Now, trying for a little greatness, against a higher-ranked opponent. Those are the clear stakes here in cloudy Southern California.