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players to :eld a team. In 2015, with the NCAA having abandoned its sanctions years early, they are free to start thinking big again. Which is just what they're doing. "We all want to play in big games – the Big Ten Championship Game, the Rose Bowl, the national championship, all that stu<. That's why we came here, to play big-time football and win champi- onships," Williams said. "I think any- thing less than that is not an option." For those of us who began paying at- tention to the program during the glory years of the Joe Paterno era, it's easy to buy into this way of thinking. That's be- cause we grew up on it. We took it as a given that the Nittany Lions would win more than they lost, probably a lot more. We assumed that the next New Year's Day bowl appearance was never more than a year or two away. We talked about the "cycle theory," which held that Penn State would contend for the national championship as soon as its most recent batch of blue-chip recruits had matured into dependable upperclassmen. But then came the 21st century, and all of the conventional wisdom that had gone unchallenged for decades promptly fell apart. From 2001 to 2010, Penn State compiled a winning percentage of 63.7. It was the program's worst decade since S T A F F P R E D I C T I O N S NATE BAUER WEBSITE EDITOR Penn State has hit peak fatigue; ex- haustion, even. The program was al- ready restless in the :nal years of the Paterno era, and the on-:eld results in the three years since have not been awe- inspiring. How could they be? Every conceivable evaluation of the program following the NCAA's sanctions had to acknowledge the challenges on the road ahead. What we've seen under Bill O'Brien and now James Franklin has been an unbelievable story of persever- ance. But there's a catch: For all the progress the program has made, the less-obvious remnants of those chal- lenges still remain. Speci:cally, an of- fensive line that struggled mightily through the 2014 season does not proj- ect to make huge leaps in the year ahead. Specialists will once again be untested. Widespread youth will give rise to in- consistency on oer predicting a 5-0 start last fall for Penn State, I've been told it might be a little foolish on my part to predict that the Lions have a legitimate chance of posting a 6-0 record going into their game against Ohio State on Oct. 17 at the Horseshoe. For that to happen, the Nit- tany Lions would have to go 4-0 against a nonconference slate that features Temple, Bu tackle spot, but if they can get that patched up without having to rearrange their line, they should improve on last year's dismal scoring average of 20.6 points per game. That's crucial, be- cause if the o

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