Will a 12-Team Format Finally Free Penn State from Playoff Purgatory?

No team was closer — but never quite good enough — in the CFP's original four-team era.

Everything is set up for Drew Allar and the Nittany Lions to make their first playoff appearance in 2024 — but that also means big pressure. (Todd Kirkland/Getty Images)

I won’t delve too deeply into the history of Penn State football — with its highs and, yes, significant lows under Joe Paterno — but it's fair to call the Nittany Lions one of the most successful teams in college history. This legacy is part of what makes the past decade in State College so frustrating, yet tantalizing.

In the four-team era, Penn State never once made the College Football Playoff. But it could also easily be argued that no team came closer to the playoff without actually making it.

From there, logic might dictate that no team would benefit more from this season’s expanded 12-team playoff field than the Lions. But if the door is left slightly ajar for them, James Franklin’s team still needs to kick it open by beating great teams — something that has been sorely lacking during PSU’s playoff exile.

On the broad basis of overall performance, Penn State has belonged squarely among a tier of teams that tended to appear in the playoff at least occasionally. While their collective +12.7 SRS from 2014-23 is not on the same level as playoff mainstays Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia or Clemson, it is fairly close to those of Notre Dame and LSU, and better than Oregon and Washington — both of whom made at least one playoff appearance.

But, of course, the devil is in the details. As good a job as Franklin has done rebuilding Penn State into a contender during the post-Paterno era (grabbing the torch from Bill O'Brien and running even further with it), and as much as the Nittany Lions always seem to factor into the championship mix — they’ve peaked among the AP’s Top 8 in each of the past eight seasons, reaching the Top 5 in four of those years — they have consistently failed to do everything it took to break through when they had the chance.

As I noted a few days ago, Penn State is just 3-17 against teams ranked in the AP Top 10 going into their matchup, the fifth-worst record of any team who played at least 20 games against foes ranked so highly during the CFP era. They’re also just 29-14 as a Top-10 team, which is the fourth-worst record of any team who went into at least 20 games with that high a ranking.

And for those curious, that has led to a 2-8 record as a Top-10 squad against a Top-10 squad, the second-worst among teams with at least eight such games in the CFP era. (Only Notre Dame, at 2-11, is worse — but they still made a couple of playoffs, because, you know, they’re Notre Dame.)

For Penn State, it’s been a toxic combination that causes them to repeatedly lose what were de facto elimination games for the four-team playoff. Only so many Big Ten teams could make the playoff — an average of fewer than one per season, in fact — so a 1-9 record versus Ohio State and a 3-7 record versus Michigan makes it tough to win the conference, and therefore tough to make a four-team playoff.

(And in 2016, the one year PSU won the Big Ten in the recent era, they carried a pair of losses in which they gave up 40+ points, so the Buckeyes — who lost to the Nittany Lions head-to-head but won in OT against a Michigan team that beat Penn State by 39 earlier in the season — made the playoff instead despite not even playing for the conference title.)

Again, Penn State is almost always relevant; you can usually count on Happy Valley to be the center of the college football universe for one or two Saturdays per year. (And to provide some iconic crowd-noise moments.) But that just makes it more maddening whenever a key loss ruins another potential playoff campaign.

The new 12-team playoff format, however, is Penn State’s best chance yet to finally crash the party. The inclusion of seven at-large teams in addition to the five highest-ranked conference champions would seem to be tailor-made for a team that ranked among the Top 12 in ESPN’s Strength of Record metric (a good proxy for how the committee views teams) in each of the past two seasons, and five times overall during the CFP era. And for a Big Ten schedule, PSU’s slate could be a lot worse: There is no Michigan, while Ohio State and conference newcomer Washington are both at home, part of a list of five Big Ten home games.

In other words, things could hardly be set up better for Penn State in 2024. As a result, ESPN’s Football Power Index forecast gives the Nittany Lions a 59 percent chance to barge into the expanded playoff, the sixth-best odds of any team:

With such an opportunity comes pressure, though — on Franklin, junior starting QB Drew Allar, and the rest of a team that has had the talent to be a playoff squad for a while, but hasn’t quite lived up to those expectations in big games.

Maybe that all changes in 2024, coinciding with the fresh start of a new postseason format. Because if not, it’s not clear what needs to happen for this program to finally kick down the door into its first College Football Playoff.

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Filed under: College Football