I am a Penn State basketball fan. Most seasons, hope is all I have. One silver lining of being a fan of a team that is, uh, lacking most seasons is the sick satisfaction I get when they do beat a team they shouldn’t. I get to sit back and watch the meltdown from opposing fanbases as they try to explain to themselves why and how their team managed to lose to the Nittany Lions. This has, in fact, happened several times against Illinois.

Never in a million years would have I have expected that the football team would give me that same satisfaction. For whatever reason, whether it’s due to the happiness they felt by having a quality team, feeling slighted that they were such underdogs, the false sense of security from beating Kansas and Nebraska, or the foolishness in thinking Penn State was somehow anywhere near close to those two, Illinois fans were mad this week.

The Fighting Illini contingent, during the span of the week, seemed to have gotten offended that:

1. Their head coach put his foot in his mouth, again.
2. James Franklin took Illinois seriously enough to create a whiteout-like environment.
3. Penn State has an agreement with the NHL that prevents them from labeling multiple games as “The ‘official’ Whiteout.”
4. Due to the new TV contracts, the Lions don’t know ahead of time which games will be night games and which aren’t, which makes picking one before the season challenging.
5. No one, including themselves, thought Illinois would be this good to date.

I told you what happened in the game in the other recap. Today, I’m going to address this.

I have zero problem with a fan base being proud or their team. I have no ill will (pun intended) toward the Illinois contingent. Their team is doing quite well this season, and could be bowl eligible well before November. If things fall just right, they might even content for the conference. I do, however, dislike projection. They took a perceived slight, blew it up well past its expiration date, then acted like Petulant Children™ when the inevitable took place. It’s great to have hope, but don’t let hope turn into arrogance. Arrogance leads to delusion, and delusion leads to believing things possible that well, simply aren’t. Be happy that your team is doing well, but don’t bill yourselves as something that you’re not.

It all makes sense, if you think about it. When you try to explain James Franklin’s history at Penn State, the word “excuses” get thrown around very quickly. Whatever you want to call what he inherited doesn’t change the fact that James Franklin, when he took over the Nittany Lions in 2014, found himself with half a scholarship roster. It took Franklin five seasons to even build a roster balanced enough to compete, yet he overachieved with the band of misfits he had in 2016. A roster that couldn’t afford any busts had plenty along the way, and, routinely, it led to clunker after clunker, where Penn State would lose games they had no business losing.

This was of course attributed not to the rebuilding job Franklin had in his hands, but instead to his ability as a coach. It wasn’t an imbalanced roster that led to a revolving door of offensive coordinators. It wasn’t the lack of depth that led to being unable to run the ball or stop the run when two of your best players went down in the fourth quarter of a game you were up two touchdowns in. It wasn’t the circumstance that led Penn State to bottom out during a global pandemic. It isn’t your bias that brings clock management blunders from nine years ago and pretends they’re still happening. It isn’t, of course, your hope that Penn State, with its mediocre coach, remains the hill that is still surmountable, in the face of the M and O shaped mountains that are too tall to climb.

The insistence that this process is a coaching deficiency over a prolonged rebuild has created this process in folks where they, seeing all the upsets of the past, believe that this is who Penn State is. That they can lose to just about anyone in the conference (or the nation*), and not in the “any given Saturday” variety, but the “James Franklin will give the game away” kind. Well, if this Saturday, and the several Saturdays in the previous two seasons are any indication, Franklin is not interested in handing the game away.

Penn State has lost plenty of players to injury this season. But they now have the quality depth to compensate. The Nittany Lions have faced challenges from unexpected places already, having to rely on their offense to mount a comeback, and they coached their way into a win. Penn State has done what you want them to do, for a team hoping to compete for the College Football playoff. But people stuck in the past, believe, or maybe hope, that boneheaded James Franklin shows up again, the one we haven’t seen in years, and gifts a game to a team that has no right to win it. Sorry friends, you’re going need to try harder moving forward.

I had no intention of even acknowledging this in an “official” matter. But I could not ignore the double standard any longer. This racist curious phenomenon, where people are far more critical of James Franklin for doing the same thing as other coaches in his tier is preposterous —there is, after all, a coach in the new Big Ten with a shared top 10 win against the same team in the same season, their “only” big win, who is billed as a top 5 coach and his team a national title contender.

Meanwhile, James Franklin is somehow lacking, reached his ceiling, or whatever other tropes come out, because he does exactly what other coaches do. I’m going to speak directly to you, Penn State fans: Don’t let people convince you that James Franklin is a bad, mediocre, or whatever, coach because he, the black guy, gets judged far more harshly than his white counterparts. Don’t reduce his tenure to the few games against Ohio State and Michigan he didn’t win. Franklin is a very good coach who has elevated his program to the point where the Illinois’s of the world can’t compete. Don’t let people tell you that’s not good enough. The Ohio States of the world will be conquered in due time. The Michigans of the world were conquered plenty, before, well, you know. We’ll see what happens with the USCs and Oregons of the world, but for now, Penn State is one of the few teams in the country that has the privilege of having a one- or two-game season.

There are 14 other teams in this conference alone who would kill for that.

*I’m staring in the direction of Morgantown as I write this