For the Next 40 Days, It’s Home Cooking and Non-Conference Cupcakes for a Hungry Penn State Football Team

Shortly after defeating West Virginia 34-12 on Saturday night in Morgantown, the Penn State football contingent loaded a fleet of buses and headed east back home to State College, arriving at the Lasch Building just before midnight.

It was the Nittany Lions’ last road trip for a while. A long while. Four home games while.

The next time Penn State hits the road, there’s a (very) good chance it will have a 5-0 record and could be ranked among the top 5 or 6 teams in the country. That trip will be 2,573 miles, the distance from Beaver Stadium to the L.A. Coliseum, home of the USC Trojans.

Penn State is planning to fly to the West Coast on Thursday, Oct. 10 for the Saturday, Oct. 12 game with USC. It would be a rare early departure for the Nittany Lions, who under James Franklin last faced a regular season roadtrip of that magnitude back in 2014. That was for Franklin’s first game as Penn State’s head coach, and PSU opened the season in Dublin, Ireland, with a 26-24 victory over Central Florida.

For now, USC is a long way off, both in distance and time. Forty days, to be exact.

Franklin, for one, wishes that his squad would get out of town at least once more before heading to Hollywood.

“We’re going to be at home for a couple of weeks,” Franklin said, now 9-2 in season-openers at Penn State and 89-39 overall. (Both opening losses were on the road; 27-10 at Temple in 2015 and 36-35 at Indiana to current Penn State DC Tom Allen in 2020.)

“That’s probably also not a positive,” Franklin added about the run of home games. “You prefer not to have four straight home games. I think for some fan bases, that would be an issue. It’s not for ours. The support that we get in Beaver Stadium and in State College, in the state of Pennsylvania, in the region, is phenomenal. We’ll be able to handle that. They’ll be asking for a fifth one after the fourth one.”

(Penn State played five consecutive home games in 2016, against Buffalo, Rutgers, San Diego State, Army and Indiana, winning all five. Current Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki was the Buffalo OC that season.)

WHAT’S AHEAD?

Penn State’s schedule for the next five weeks breaks this way:

Saturday, Bowling Green (1-0), Beaver Stadium, noon . Bowling Green defeated Fordham 41-17 to open the season, scoring 27 consecutive points to start the game, including a 100-yard kick-off return. BG plays at Texas A&M in two weeks.
Sept. 14, Bye week.
Sept. 21, Kent State (0-1), Beaver Stadium. Kent lost 55-24 at Pitt in its season-opener.
Sept. 28, Illinois (1-0), Beaver Stadium, Homecoming . The Illini beat Eastern Illinois 45-0 in its season opener, and faces Kotelnicki-less Kansas next Saturday.
Oct. 5, UCLA, Beaver Stadium. The Bruins are in a massive rebuild.

That stretch is not exactly like the Murderer’s Row that could follow: USC (Oct. 12), Bye week , Wisconsin on the road (Oct. 26), then Ohio State (Nov. 2) and Washington in a White Out (Nov. 9) back-to-back in Beaver Stadium. That stretch will define Penn State’s 2024 season, not the string coming up.

Not that Illinois won’t be tough. Bret Bielema is a smart football coach, and we saw how the Illini used nine overtimes to embarrass No. 7 Penn State (playing with a banged-up Sean Clifford) in 2021. But a strong effort by UCLA would be surprising. In the two weeks leading up to their trip to Happy Valley, they are on the road to play LSU in Baton Rouge and then host powerhouse Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

After Saturday’s game, I asked Penn State’s stellar safeties, KJ Winston and Jaylen Reed (who combined for 21 tackles, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery vs. WVU), for their take on spending the next 40 days at home:

Reed: “I don’t pay any attention to that…I don’t go on Twitter, I’m not logged onto Instagram. I just take each game as it comes. …You know, it’s always fun to play in Beaver [Stadium]. But everybody is not ready to play in Beaver, so that’s a good thing.”

Winston: “It’s going to be very different. Especially in my time here, we’ve never had that long of a period of time where we were playing at home. But we’re going to do the same thing. The standard is the standard. It’s nice to be at home, in front of our fans. When we do have to suit up and go out of town, we have to be ready for that regardless.”

In Franklin’s first decade, Penn State had at least two away games in its first five games a total of six times. The exceptions: in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. Under CJF, Penn State’s best starts to a season came in 2017 (7-0), 2019 (8-0) and 2023 (6-0).

SHOULD NON-CON = NON-COMPETITIVE?

At Penn State, Franklin is 27-2 in regular season non-conference games. He is 24-0 at home, 2-2 on the road and 1-0 at neutral sites.

Only one of those 29 regular-season games was against an opponent ranked at the time: No. 22 Auburn at home in 2021. Penn State won 28-20 in Beaver Stadium in the fourth game of the 2022 season.

After the Nittany Lions beat Auburn 41-12 in a return road game the next year, Franklin said never again. And he meant it.

West Virginia was a test, in many ways, which Penn State passed with flying colors. Among the challenges: it was the season opener, a road game, in a potentially hostile environment, against a better-than-average opponent (WVU was 9-4 in 2023) and in a rivalry situation, even though before last year the two teams had not met since 1992. (I heard a million “F--- you, Penn State” chants throughout Morgantown, in the tailgating parking lots and in the stadium on Saturday.)

Franklin, whose goal is to get Penn State into the College Football Playoff and has been honest in not wanting to play marquee or even second-tier opponents in non-conference games, basically said so again on Saturday.

“You guys saw it today across the country,” Franklin said post-game. “We’ve seen it every year. These opening games, playing these types of opponents, they’re tough and they’re challenging.

It’s a philosophy, right? Athletic directors have a big role in this. Head coaches have a big role in this. What type of out-of-conference games are you going to schedule? And what’s in everybody's best interest?

“You see across the country: You start out with a tough loss, and you play maybe not as clean as you normally play, because you’re still working through some of the kinks. Obviously, when you get the win, it’s a huge positive. But if you don’t, then you know it can really start your season off on the wrong path, and you’re going to have to battle through it.

“But coming here and getting a win in this type of environment, when it works, I think it’s a huge win. But the question is, does it really make sense? Obviously, me and [Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft] have had a ton of conversations, and he’s got strong opinions on it.”

ON THE SCHEDULE

Franklin will get his wish moving forward. For the next four years, the Nittany Lions’ non-conference schedule will not be confused with those of certain other Big Ten brethren, who take a different philosophy. For example, here’s a sample of Big Ten non-con opponents:

Michigan — Texas in 2024, at Oklahoma in 2025
Ohio State — Texas in 2025
UCLA — LSU in 2024
USC — LSU, Notre Dame in 2024
Wisconsin — Alabama in 2024

Conversely, former Pac-12ers Oregon and Washington do not face any top 25 non-conference opponents in the next few seasons. Here is Penn State’s non-conference schedule the next four seasons. Note that in 2027, Penn State will be featuring a renovated Beaver Stadium, with lots of luxury boxes and likely higher ticket prices — and low-quality non-conference opponents:

2025 — Nevada, Florida International, Villanova
2026 — Marshall, at Temple, Buffalo
2027 — Syracuse, Delaware, Temple
2028 — Ball State, at Syracuse, TBA

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