… You can’t get to here from there without a lot of slogging through the wilderness. And Penn State men’s basketball was nowhere; it had a lot of slogging to do.
The best thing you can say after the Nittany Lions’ 27-11 season is that the program is no longer dead in the swamp but clearly heading toward civilization.
This was the second consecutive season in which State made significant improvement. You haven’t really been able to say that since the program’s Big Ten incubation period in the mid 1990s.
This PSU team learned how to finish games. It played 20 contests decided by single-digit margins and won 15 of them, many times coming from behind in the final minutes.
That sort of repeated success creates a positive mind-set that cannot be quantified. When the young players on this team find themselves in close games later in their careers, they will expect to find a way to win.
Just being able to see every conference road game this team plays gives me the unmistakable feeling the Big Ten Network is quickly leveling the recruiting playing field. …