Penn State Regroups After 'Heartbreaking' Loss to Michigan

With no time for a 'grieving period,' the Nittany Lions pivot to finishing the regular season 10-2.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. | It’s been a tumultuous week for Penn State football. The Nittany Lions lost to Michigan on Saturday with another lackluster offensive performance, leading coach James Franklin to fire offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich on Sunday.

Barring a miracle, Penn State won't make the College Football Playoff during the four-team era and is doomed (harsh word) to another 10-2 regular season at best. That's nothing to complain about for most teams, but hopes have grown higher in Happy Valley. As a result, a post-Michigan grieving period would seem natural for a team coming to terms with its shifting goals. Right?

“Naturally, you'd want there to be a grieving period. But in terms of going 1-0 next week, we can't do that," Penn State offensive lineman Caedan Wallace said Wednesday. "We couldn't take a day off or practice off or a period off because we're grieving our last loss. Because then it'll turn into another loss. So for us, like I said earlier, Rutgers, Rutgers, Rutgers. It's not much we can do about what happened on Saturday, but we can go out this week and win.”

Penn State hosts Rutgers at noon Saturday for Senior Day. Wallace is one of a few senior players with an extra year of eligibility still available to them. He didn’t disclose Wednesday whether he’ll take it. Dvon Ellies, another of that group, spent a lot of time discussing the ways in which this team gets up from the gut punches it endured against Michigan and Ohio State.

Ellies has become one of the more vocal leaders of this team, despite not being a captain, and was named by his peers as one of the strongest voices in the aftermath of both losses.

“I feel like coming up in the program, seeing the things I've seen, I've come into a leadership role, and I felt like after Saturday it was really important for me to be that leader,” said Ellies, who often has been candid about this season. “The mark of a great leader is always in times of chaos or always in times of despair, not necessarily always when things are good. So I felt like it was important for me to step up in that time and just be the leader the guys needed.”

His message? “Keep your head up. We got everything we need in the locker room,” Ellies said. “We just gotta be conscious of who we are. We need to maintain our focus for the rest of the season. We got two good teams coming up, and we just need to stay together.”

Penn State's bowl projections currently place the team on the New Year’s 6 bubble, a respectable way to finish the season. But there’s an acknowledgement that this season felt destined for more. It’s now time for Penn State to rally, with games remaining against Rutgers and Michigan State, in order to close things out on the national stage.

“I feel like nobody's truly OK, when you put so much into it, especially in the offseason, especially with so many expectations — high expectations, not only from the outside but also within. We have so many talented players, so many talented guys,” Ellies said. “It's hard to be OK after a loss like that, just given how much we've put into it, how much work we've done on a day-to-day basis to become the team we've been pretty much all year. And to fall short like that is heartbreaking.”

“I hate to sound calloused, but I've been playing football for a really long time, since I was about 4. Lost a lot of games, won a lot of games,” Wallace added. “I know that if I grieved over this Michigan thing, we still have three more games left, then it wouldn't bode well for us. It would spiral out. It's kind of like a slippery-slope type deal. So I just focus on next week. I focus on what I can do, like what I physically can do to not lose a game.”

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Max Ralph is a Penn State senior studying Broadcast Journalism with minors in sports studies and Japanese. He previously covered Penn State football for two years with The Daily Collegian and has reported with the Associated Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter (X) @maxralph_ and Instagram @mralph_59.

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