The Drop, Week 6: [stifled laughter]

“Tired and embarrassed” by Quinn Dombrowski, CC BY-SA 2.0

It was a whopping one whole week ago, in the wake of Iowa's much-closer-than-anyone-expected loss to Indiana that I compared the levels of pain between Iowa fans, Georgia fans, and Penn State fans, and asked who you would want to be if you had a choice. My implication was that you wouldn't want to be a Penn State fan, given that the Nits had once again lost a winnable game at home to a ranked team. That has been a pattern under James Franklin.

I trust that this week I don't need to ask. Top ten teams simply do not lose on the first Saturday of October to previously-winless teams that have already fired their head coach.

It's possible Penn State turns it around from this point and finds a way to the playoff, even though it still has to play Ohio State and Indiana and wait a minute they lost to UCLA so I should mention that they still have to play Northwestern and Michigan State too and see, this is why I think James Franklin has hit his ceiling in Happy Valley. Drew Allar won't quite rise to the level of Juice Williams on the "you had this quarterback and what did it get you?" scale, but it will be close.