Penn State Football’s effort there, but Ohio State’s talent overcomes | Takeaways

Penn State Football suffered its third consecutive loss of the season, falling to Ohio State by a final score of 33-24 in Columbus.

Truthfully, it isn’t easy to find ‘takeaways’ for Penn State Football at this point in the season, as all of the glaring issues remain the same.

The Nittany Lions can’t run the ball, struggle to stop the run, a few self-inflicted wounds; penalties, and turnovers that prove costly.

So at this point, none of those are really takeaways, as much as they are obvious facts.

Obviously, in a loss, there is more bad than good, but zeroing in on those aspects of Penn State Football’s latest defeat, a 33-24 loss to Ohio State, would just be redundant.

These takeaways are not so much from this specific game, as they are takeaways from the past few games and/or takeaways from the program as a whole, that have been proven over these past few games.

Here are 3 key things that we learned in Penn State Football’s loss against the Buckeyes.

Penn State Football will almost always “play to the level” of their competition

If Penn State Football played like that last week, they beat Illinois by 30+.

Conversely, if they played this week like they did last week, they lose by 50+ to Ohio State.

Over the years, even in wins, Penn State Football has done one of two things against lesser competition. The Lions have either come out flat (think Rutgers in 2019), or they come out playing well, and then take their foot off the gas far sooner than one would like (think Purdue in 2019).

Or sometimes, they do both and lose … like last week vs Illinois.

So even against teams that they are more talented than and should beat by a lot, Penn State does not seem to play with the same intensity that they do against teams like Ohio State.

Now, the flip side of that, against teams more talented than them when many people feel they will lose by 30+ (think Ohio State almost every year), the Nittany Lions play with them and it is usually only a two-score game at worst in the fourth quarter.

This is obviously both good and bad (mostly bad).

It is great that they seem to play better than they truly are against teams like Ohio State and give themselves a fighters chance, but it is also far worse to come out sleepwalking against the Illinois and Rutgers of the world.

Great teams/programs come out with the same intensity, regardless of who they are playing. You can point fingers at the coaches for this, and certainly, that makes some sense to do so, but at the end of the day, if the players don’t come out focused, executing on the fundamentals, and playing with their hair on fire, it doesn’t matter what the coaching staff says or does.