against Boston College in the Pinstripe
Bowl that decided the outcome in dou-
ble overtime.
This year, by contrast, the Lions
clinched a winning record on the last
day of October. The momentum from
their victory over the Illini may not have
carried over into their next game, a 23-
21 loss at Northwestern seven days later
in which they came out er the sanctions went away and they
were allowed to have 85 players on
scholarship again. Then again, maybe
they wouldn't. The last time a program
was hit this hard, it never bounced back.
That program was SMU. The Mustangs
had been national championship con-
tenders in the early 1980s, going 11-0-1
in '82 to ;nish No. 2 in the polls behind
Penn State. But the NCAA shut them
down for the '87 season due to a pattern
of recruiting violations. The school be-
gan ;elding a team again in 1989, and
since then it has enjoyed only four win-
ning seasons. During that same span, it
has had seven one-win seasons, and as
of this writing was working on an eighth
in 2015.
That the Nittany Lions do not appear
headed the way of SMU is partly due to
their continuing ability to recruit. In-
deed, that's the biggest thing the skep-
tics got wrong. Just six months a>er the
NCAA announced its penalties, the Li-
ons signed a class that not only included
;ve-star quarterback Christian Hacken-
berg but also Brandon Bell, DaeSean
Hamilton, Brendan Mahon, Andrew
Nelson and Garrett Sickels. All are
starters, and Adam Breneman would be
starting, too, if not for a knee injury.
The other factor that has helped Penn
State weather the storm is, of course, the
NCAA's decision to walk back the sanc-
tions. Regardless of whether you view it
as an acknowledgement of the universi-
ty's commitment to ful;lling the terms
of the consent decree that it signed in
2012 or as a tacit admission that Mark
Emmert and company overreached
when they handed down the penalties,
there's no denying that the decision to
backtrack has changed the program's
outlook considerably, brightening what
a lot of people thought was going to be,
at the very least, a lost decade.
And by a lot of people, I mean
a lot of
people. SB Nation's Jones summed up
the conventional wisdom in describing
Beaver Stadium as a sort of postapoca-
lyptic wasteland. "Who wants to pay
money to watch their favorite team get
beat by 50 points?" he asked. "That's
what it's about to be, except for Bill
O'Brien, they aren't even going to
watch. It's just going to be a bunch of
bleachers, and he's going to be sitting
there watching them get their asses
whooped."
That prediction, like most of the oth-
ers that were o=ered up in the immedi-
ate a>ermath of the sanctions, turned
out to be completely wrong. The Nittany
Lions ranked in the top ;ve nationally in
attendance in 2012, '13 and '14, and,
heading into this year's home ;nale
against Michigan, those fans had not
had to sit through any ghastly 50-point
beatdowns. They didn't even have to sit
through all that many losses. Prior to
their game against the Wolverines, the
Lions had gone 19-8 at home since the
imposition of the sanctions and 29-18
overall. Their average margin of defeat in
those 18 losses was 12.8 points. Take out
the one ghastly beatdown they
did su=er
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