After starting Big Ten play 0-6, with three losses with James Franklin and three after he was fired, Penn State needed interim head coach Terry Smith to lead a three-game win streak to reach bowl eligibility. Now, a day before the College Football Playoff is set and bowl game designations are officially announced, and a day after hiring Matt Campbell to be the program's next head coach, the Nittany Lions know where they’ll be heading for the postseason.
According to On3’s Brett McMurphy, Penn State will be playing in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium on December 27, at Noon ET, against an ACC foe. While nothing is set yet, there’s a strong chance that the ACC foe in question could be Penn State’s biggest in-state rival.
Penn State could meet Pitt in the 2025 Pinstripe Bowl
The Pinstripe Bowl is the only Big Ten bowl game affiliation that explicitly features the Big Ten vs. the ACC. While it would be a meeting of a 6-6 Penn State team still led by its interim head coach Terry Smith as it transitions to the Campbell era against an 8-4 Pitt team that fell flat in its two opportunities to make noise in the College Football Playoff race with losses to Notre Dame and Miami, Penn State vs. Pitt would be a highly-sought-after matchup for the Pinstripe Bowl.
Penn State and Pitt have played 100 times, by far the most Penn State has played against any single opponent. The last meeting came in 2019, ending a four-year rivalry revival, which featured three Penn State wins after a 2016 loss to the Panthers.
Penn State leads the series 53-43-4 all-time with 10 wins in the last 12 meetings. The two programs played annually from 1935 until 2000. The four meetings between 2016 and 2019 have been the only matchups since the rivalry ended, and the two teams have never met in the postseason.
With the ACC still holding out for the possibility of Miami getting an at-large bid into the field, along with the chance that the conference misses the CFP altogether if Duke wins the ACC Championship Game on Saturday night and the committee opts for Sun Belt Champion JMU as the fifth-highest-ranked conference champion over the Blue Devils, the ACC will not know which teams are heading to which bowl game until after the CFP selection on Sunday.