College GameDay: Penn State was an ‘abject disaster’ vs. UCLA

In the days since Saturday, everyone has been trying to make sense of the Penn State implosion against UCLA. Frankly, it just didn’t make much sense on the surface.

And even now, some are having trouble understanding how it got that bad for the Nittany Lions. The ESPN College GameDay Podcast crew chimed in with their take, and analyst Dan Wetzel pulled no punches.

“I’ll go negative. This was an abject disaster,” Wetzel said. “I watched a great deal of this game. Was not planning on it. Remember looking and there were all these games on in this window, because it was a great window. Was like, ‘I’m not watching that.’ Then sure enough I’m watching.

“Penn State was an absolute mess. They didn’t know what they were doing. They get beat on an onside kick. Early in the game, they get beat on an onside kick, late in the game they let an extra five seconds run off because nobody anticipates they’re going to run a safety play, which they should have at the very end.”

From start to finish, it was a series of unfortunate errors and miscues for Penn State. But, worse, the team also just got flat-out pushed around.

The offensive plan from Penn State was equally confounding. It looked like a team that wasn’t sure what to do with its personnel, which, by most accounts, is actually quite good at the individual level.

“The jet sweep read option or whatever that was, what are we doing?” Wetzel said. “You’ve got two great running backs and you’re running Drew Allar. Whenever I see someone that supposedly is a great quarterback and they’re running halfback option passes, why? You’ve got the quarterback, make him throw the ball. ‘Oh he was good as a junior in high school.’ OK, I don’t care whether he could throw it back in Calhoun County.”

Wetzel went on to surmise that Penn State is missing key players from last year’s squad that it had become overly reliant on. The whole thing worked well when the Nittany Lions could lean on those players.

Without them? Not so much.

“This is a team that they clearly miss Abdul Carter, they clearly miss Ty Warren,” Wetzel said. “Everyone looked, ‘Well, they’re bringing everyone back.’ Well, they’re not bringing those guys back. They had no plan. They got a lucky break if you want to call it lucky, with a scoop and score, blocked kick. They come back and still should have won the game.”

What’s crazier is that this wasn’t Penn State losing to a team that has a chance to go on and win the Big Ten. That you could explain away.

“UCLA is terrible,” Wetzel said. “They never led. They never had a lead in the month of September. Never led. Zero leads. They lost by 25 to New Mexico in that same building a couple weeks ago. This team’s terrible.

“Now I’ll give them this: They’re an 0-4 team with Nico Iamaleava, so you don’t normally get 0-4 teams with a guy that’s probably going to play in the NFL at some point. So there’s that. But this was just they slept-walked, they weren’t ready, they were getting mauled at the line, they were not creative offensively, they didn’t go to their stars.”

Then there was the aftermath. And it exposed a problem with the Big Ten, potentially. Not necessarily a Penn State-specific issue.

All in all, it was just a colossal failure. And it likely ruined the season.

“James Franklin looks like, there were times he just looked like resigned to it on the sideline,” Wetzel said. “I know he’s not. He took the blame, as he always does. I always appreciate that. But there was still, ‘We’ve got to fly all the way across the country.’ Yeah, it stinks, but you should have told your school not to add these teams. This was just ridiculous to lose this game. Ridiculous.”