After watching last night's game...the answer to the question is miles.
A lot of teams will be saying that after playing Ohio State in Columbus this season. This is still the same team that beat up on Purdue and beat a good Illini squad and competed well with Indy. Also, without two of its top six players, PSU is going to have a tough time competing on any given night in the Big Ten.
I really feel there will be a much different dynamic to the team next season with the addition of Newbill and the freshmen. Those will be three and maybe four of Pat's kids who will give this team an entirely different vibe. Give kids like Graham and Travis and Lewis and Glover another year and the best part
...Timmy will still be around.
NIT next year...guaranteed.
I am exteremely optimistic, and I believe PC has us headed in the right direction. We will be competititve night in and night out soon, but last showed how much talent we need and how hard you have to play on the road to be in the top echelon of teams. I aspire to us being what OSU has become under Matta. It may be a long haul getting there, but I think we have the guy in place to take us there.
I'm hoping for Wisconsin under Bo, and in many ways, I don't think that's a step down.
I'm thinking PSU under Bruce! 
Cappy,
I hope you are half right...I'll take Bruce's bench coaching, but not his recruiting style. I was at UP from 85-92 and witnessed first hand the slow, methodical climb to respectability in the A-10 (which was not nearly as tough as it has been for the last 15 years) interspersed with a lot of lousy basketball. Bruce's dislike of recruiting is well known...his philosophy of mixing solid players while taking a chance on a few under-recruited guys made the climb take longer (yes, I realize from where he was starting, having witnessed many a loss to Lehigh and Loyola (MD)). His bench coaching was able to overcome enough of the talent gap (see UCLA) by the time he left.
One thing both JD and ED continued at Penn State was this type of recruiting. However, both JD and ED were no where close to the bench coaches that Parkhill was; in addition, in the Big Ten, if you have a couple of iffy recruiting classes, the results are more apparent on the downside. Also, if I remember correctly, on both of JD's NCAA teams, we "got lucky" in that major contributors were 5 year seniors due to prior injuries (Ivory; Earl and Gaudio???). To ED's credit, he appeared to land one guy a year who was legitimate B10 contributor. However, it seemed like the rest of the class where "chance or overlooked" guys; most have not really panned out as consistent B10 contributors.
So far, I like PC from a bench coaching stand point (changing defenses, much better sets in half court (poor shooting not withstanding) and his attitude toward recruiting, going after top 150 guys. Let's revisit in 4 years to see what the state of the program is, not have this ill-informed argument of "running off players" without all the facts being known (I believe something on a much larger scale happened recently; have we not learned?)
