Multiple Penn State football players snubbed for Big Ten weekly award

The Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week for Week 6 was announced, and not a single Penn State football player received a mention for it.

Penn State football’s dominant win over Purdue was quite impressive this past weekend. Whenever a team can clinch a 35-7 victory over a conference opponent, there’s always a reason to celebrate it. Even though the Penn State offense has its late-game struggles, the defense still made up for everything with quite an impressive performance.

For the most part, Purdue couldn’t move the ball on Penn State’s elite defense. Granted, they were playing against the Boilermakers backup quarterback, who was also missing his No. 1 target — but Penn State can’t control who they play. There was an opponent set in front of them, and they played the game as is, and put on a phenomenal defensive performance.

As a team, Penn State managed to flirt with the program’s total single-game sack record on Saturday as they collected ten by the end of the game. Despite not defeating the record, Penn State’s performance was surely not one to forget.

And considering that multiple players even stood out themselves during the dominant defensive performance, we were curious to find out which Nittany Lion was going to earn the Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week. The results came out on Monday morning, and to our surprise, not a single Nittany Lion was mentioned this week.

Who received a snub?

The Big Ten committee elected to go with a Michigan pass rusher this week for the weekly acknowledgment. Sophomore defensive lineman Aidan Hutchinson won Big Ten Defensive Player of the week after his solid performance against Iowa. However, we believe that Penn State should’ve been mentioned in the conversation as they had multiple candidates.

Lions’ safety LaMont Wade played his best game of the season on Saturday with eleven total tackles, one of which was for a loss. In addition to that, Wade also had a sack and a pass deflection. Another candidate could’ve been Penn State’s defensive end, Shaka Toney.

As we know, Toney led the pass rush with three total sacks, and also had four tackles against Purdue as well. Last week, Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford managed to win Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week, but he had to share the honors with another.

This week, we think the Big Ten should’ve considered the same deal with Hutchinson and another player from Penn State. Unfortunately, that’s not the route that the conference committee went to. Perhaps, that could put a chip on Penn State’s shoulder as the snub surely adds some bulletin board material moving forward.