5 meaningless bowl games Penn State doesn't even deserve to be invited to

Northwestern was absolutely expected to beat Penn State this weekend – in field hockey, where they're the reigning national champions and No. 1 team in the country.

Not in football.

And yet every reasonable Penn State fan still entered Saturday's home game at Beaver Stadium thinking that, yes, it is quite possible that the Nittany Lions, 0-5 against the spread this year and just one week removed from a loss as 24.5-point favorites against the UCLA Bruins, might blow it again.

We'll save you from the "first off, credit to them; they played a really good football game" jargon. We'll save you from the "I thought we did a lot of the little things well" go-to favorite.

They indeed blew it again, this time as 21.5-point favorites, to become the first FBS team since 1978 to lose back-to-back games as 20-point favorites.

And this time, nobody could hide behind the misleading moral victory of a "comeback" like they could against Oregon, and then again against UCLA in a game that made them the first team ranked inside the top 10 to lose to a team sitting at 0-4 or worse since 1985.

It's always tough to see a player go down with an injury, especially in the latter stages of a game and in a way that will have effectively ended his collegiate career, and you feel for Drew Allar.

But from a broader team standpoint, I can't help but think back to the UCLA loss and wonder how Allar would have responded if asked by a reporter whether or not Penn State is still in the hunt for the College Football Playoff after this week's disaster.

Rather than actually focusing on "Northwestern, Northwestern, Northwestern!!!", like head coach James Franklin tweeted earlier this week, Penn State was already making CFP reservations as a 10-2 team with wins over No. 1 Ohio State and a presumably top five Indiana team. They were going to run the table.

Now they're 3-3. They're 0-3 in the Big Ten. They're completely out of the CFP discussion, and they have an uphill climb just to become bowl eligible.

The unfortunate realities are as follows. Allar, who has unfortunately now been ruled out for the season with the injury he suffered late in the Northwestern loss, has long had all the makings of Christian Hackenberg 2.0.

I'm talking about how he's been hyped up as the potential No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft just because he supposedly "fits" the mold that NFL starting quarterbacks needed to fit to succeed 25 years ago. He has never come close to standing out as a Heisman hopeful, and three years into his career as the starting signal caller, one would have expected to see much more than "flashes" of potential.

You never want to kick a man while he's down, and his health is the number one priority as far as his own future goes. But as harsh as it may sound, that still doesn't erase everything else that's built up to the team's third straight loss.

Then there's the near-indisputable assertion that, even at 15th on the salary list, James Franklin is currently the most overpaid head coach in college football, which makes the possibility of a contract buyout even more agonizingly distant for the single-most ticked off fanbase in NCAA sports.

In addition, Jim Knowles' defense literally has not made a single meaningful stop all season, and you do have to wonder why losing the now highest-paid defensive coordinator in the nation didn't really seem to bother Ohio State all that much. Or maybe now you don't. And finally, Andy Kotelnicki is calling plays like he's trying to run up the score in rookie mode on Madden.

Am I missing anything?

Oh yeah; why does it seem like Pennsylvania teams have this obsession with misrepresenting their homefield advantage?

Penn State, which lost the White Out Game against Oregon in front of a crowd of over 111,000 fans two weekends ago, just lost at Beaver Stadium to the team ranked No. 67 in the FPI.

It happened just two days after the Philadelphia Phillies were eliminated from the MLB playoffs as the only team not to win a home game in the LDS, despite supposedly having the greatest postseason homefield advantage in the history of sports.

Unrelated? Sure. Maybe. But still interesting, if not mildly coincidental, either way, given the scuffling state of PA sports at the moment.

Other than that, everything's perfectly fine in (Un)Happy Valley.

Back to the topic of bowl eligibility. Quite frankly, even if Allar had avoided a long-term injury, Penn State was looking poised, on paper, to fall to 3-6. For the past three games, lack of execution had completely overridden the talent on what is supposedly Franklin's best-ever roster, and there have been no signs of that changing.

And here we were thinking that the Texas Longhorns' start to the season was just as embarrassing. Funny.

Winning at Kinnick Stadium against Iowa is a tall task no matter how good you are (and Penn State isn't), and back-to-back games against Ohio State and Indiana, which might well be the top two teams in the country after the Hoosiers went into Eugene and delivered a statement victory against the Ducks, are both almost sure losses.

At that point, you'd have to hope (or maybe you don't; who knows?) that Penn State runs the table against Michigan State, Nebraska, and Rutgers to get to that six-win mark. And as of this moment, two wins seems like the absolute best-case scenario out of that trio of games.

I really don't think there's any Power Four team you can say Penn State would, for certain, beat if they played them tomorrow, but that's a subject for another day.

For that reason, here are five (meaningless) consolation bowls, bowls generally featuring Big Ten teams which barely anybody actually watches, which Penn State doesn't even deserve to be invited to.

NOTE: College Football Playoff bowl games are not included for obvious reasons.

ReliaQuest Bowl

This was the bowl I had predicted Penn State to be in after their then-shocking loss to UCLA. But the previous season's Big Ten entry, the Michigan Wolverines, got there after managing to beat the eventual national champion Ohio State Buckeyes, something Franklin hasn't done since 2016, and something Penn State hasn't done in Columbus since 2011.

At 7-5, Michigan managed to knock off the Alabama Crimson Tide for the second year in a row.

Penn State has yet to beat a team ranked higher than No. 123 in FPI, and you could make a case that their best win is against an FCS opponent heading into Week 8. So forget about beating a relevant SEC school.

Duke's Mayo Bowl

While I'm sure a large contingent of the Penn State fanbase would like to throw Franklin into a pool of mayonnaise, given the current state of the program, it doesn't look like they will get that chance, even if he doesn't get fired.

The Minnesota Golden Gophers finished in a respectable seventh-place tie in the first year of the 18-team Big Ten (and would have finished tied for fifth had they not blown the Penn State game) in 2024 en route to this bowl game, one of several that fans only know exists because of its unique name.

Even at 7-5, they possessed a respectable resume with two wins against teams ranked inside the top 25. One of those ranked wins even came on the road, giving them something Penn State doesn't have since 2021. The one-point loss to No. 4 Penn State ironically probably hurt Penn State more than it did Minnesota.

Music City Bowl

The Big Ten's 2024 representative in the Music City Bowl was Iowa, and similar to this year's Penn State team, Iowa's only "ranked win" came against a team ranked against FCS competition (No. 19 Illinois State).

Villanova, whom Penn State beat to wrap up their season-opening three-game win streak against three cupcake opponents, is ranked No. 17 at the moment and was No. 11 at the time of the matchup.

But even Iowa posted a respectable season in Big Ten play, losing only three games. Penn State has notched three Big Ten losses in a span of 15 days, and that number could very well end up being doubled in the near future.

Citrus Bowl

This one is a little more obvious, considering the fact that it is one of the non-College Football Playoff/New Year's Six bowl games that has generally featured two ranked teams, even before the NY6 all shifted over to the 12-team CFP bracket. The 2024 game featured No. 21 Illinois vs. No. 14 South Carolina.

Penn State was officially unranked in the AP poll before the Northwestern loss, but the votes showed they'd have been No. 28 if the rankings actually went down that low. Don't expect them to get any votes this week, and if they do, expect whoever votes for them to be restricted from receiving future AP ballots.

A Big Ten team has been a part of this bowl game for the past seven years in a row, and the only occasion on which that team was not ranked was January 2023, back when the flawed division setup resulted in a mediocre Purdue team getting in simply because they had the honor of getting demolished by eventual CFP participant Michigan in the Big Ten Championship Game.

Pinstripe Bowl

There were a number of bowl games I could have inserted here, with two strong contenders being the Rate Bowl and the Las Vegas Bowl, but I went with the Pinstripe Bowl simply because this is the bowl Penn State made it to in 2014, which was Franklin's first year as head coach of what was once a proud football team.

Hackenberg threw for 371 and four touchdowns, a quarterback performance the likes of which Penn State currently hasn't seen since Trace McSorley in the 2016 Big Ten Championship Game against Wisconsin, to win that game against Boston College in overtime, lifting the Nittany Lions above .500 to wrap up the season.

At that point, that might well have been considered the standard, and an acceptable one at that, given where the program was just three years prior.

Here we are nearly 11 years later, and Penn State has regressed. Rather than accepting the slap-in-the-face embarrassment of playing a late December football game at Yankee Stadium after entering the season as one of the favorites to win their first national championship since 1986, the Nittany Lions are better off being left off the guest list.

Because for a university of Penn State's stature, it's been a stunning spiral at best.