Penn State’s potential first-round College Football Playoff opponent could have 40 years of revenge on its mind

Penn State stayed put at No. 4 in this week’s College Football Playoff rankings release. The Nittany Lions are the third highest-ranked team in the Big Ten in the third edition of the rankings in the 12-team CFP era and without a clear path to the Big Ten championship game, a top-four seed, and a first-round bye, the Nittany Lions will likely host a first-round CFP game at Beaver Stadium if they win out. 

James Franklin has been knocking on the door of the CFP, essentially since he took over at Penn State over a decade ago, and all it took was the playoff expanding by 300% for Franklin to still lose his most important game of the year and potentially earn an at-large bid. Now, he just has to beat Minnesota in Minneapolis this Saturday, and Maryland in Happy Valley in Week 14, to finish 11-1. That’s not a certainty, but it is likely, so the bigger question, and the more optimistic one, is who will the Nittany Lions host in front of 111,000 fans? 

Because the top four spots go to the four highest-ranked conference champions, Penn State, unless it gets to Indianapolis on tiebreakers and beats Oregon, will have to settle for a spot at No. 5 or lower. This week, Boise State was the fourth-highest-ranked conference leader, so in this projected bracket, if the season ended today, Oregon, Texas, Miami, and Boise State would all earn byes. Penn State, on the other hand, projects as the No. 6 seed and would have its hands full with the Georgia Bulldogs. 

After falling out of the bracket project at No. 12 last week after a loss to Ole Miss in Oxford, Kirby Smart’s team responded with a 31-17 win over Tennessee in Athens. That win earned Georgia a spot at No. 10, one spot behind the Rebels, and one spot ahead of No. 11 Tennessee, which gets bumped out of the bracket by projected Big 12 champion BYU, which takes the No. 12 seed as the fifth-highest-ranked conference champion. 

There are five two-loss teams in the SEC, No. 15 Texas A&M, No. 11 Tennessee, No. 10 Georgia, No. 9 Ole Miss, and No. 7 Alabama, which has been a difficult mess for the committee to sort out. Alabama has beaten Georgia, Ole Miss has beaten Georgia, Georgia has beaten Tennessee and Texas, and Tennessee has beaten Alabama. Head-to-head can’t be the only way to sort out that group, but it has kept the Bulldogs behind the Rebels, and hypothetically playing Penn State if the season ended today. The Nittany Lions will likely be playing one of those five teams in the first round, but in this particular matchup, there would be serious revenge on the line. 

Penn State and Georgia have played just twice in history, most recently in the 2016 TaxSlayer Bowl, but most consequentially in the 1983 Sugar Bowl for the National Championship. The Bulldogs got a measure of revenge back in 2016 against Christian Hackenberg and Trace McSorley with a 24-17 win in the final game before Kirby Smart took over the program, but this time around it would be, not for a national title, but for a chance to keep playing for one. 

Smart has led Georgia back to the mountaintop twice, winning back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022, but since winning that Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day 1983, Penn State has just one national title, in 1986, also under Joe Paterno.