Jeremiah Smith eyes an incoming projectile in the Buckeyes’ Saturday win over Illinois. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Road construction in Indiana…unpredictability at all levels of football…and even a glimpse of it at the next level when you consider what happened at Penn State.
If there’s anything that’s tougher than predicting high school football games this fall…does not driving in the state of Indiana rank right up there at the top?
I had forgotten. It’s been six months since I tried to drive down Indiana route 37 to the IU campus last spring to watch Ohio State play baseball in Bloomington – almost two years since the Buckeyes opened the ’23 football season down there and route 37 was still the politicians’ dream of progress. And nearly three years since I had driven north on I-65 to Purdue the season before – another mess of barrels and bulldozers standing motionless.
Saturday morning, and later on Sunday afternoon, I was reminded again that nothing’s ever predictable on Indiana highways as I (and a lot of you) drove between the Ohio border and Indianapolis. It seems that they never get around to fixing anything in Indiana until it’s absolutely gone…like a deserted house with the windows broken out and weeds growing up over the porch. And then, they try to do it all at once…expanding two lanes into three while maintaining normal traffic flow.
And detours? Imagine taking a side road in Indiana, where zip codes and high school point guards can be found on a 1:1 ratio. The state motto in Indiana is The Crossroads of America. Sunday I thought of different, more-fitting options.
Who’s Yer Pothole?, for instance.
Or, We’re Not Happy ‘Til You’re Not Happy.
Or even, Come Again, And Stay In Indiana. You almost have no choice!
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We all saw the complexity and inconsistency with 2025 football this weekend, and none more poignant than what we saw during Northwestern’s win Saturday against Penn State…that ultimately (and it didn’t take long) cost Penn State coach James Franklin his job. Franklin was fired on Sunday. And what a way to go! Penn State has to pay Franklin $49 million to satisfy the remaining years on his contract.
Fired? Fire me like that just once in my lifetime…please!
There really was nothing following the 2024 season to make you suspect that the weeds were growing over the porch at Penn State. The Nittany Lions made an FCS appearance last year, and had one of the nation’s top quarterback prospects returning for this year in senior Drew Allar, from Medina, Ohio.
But whatever it was, it went south in a hurry for the Lions, Franklin, Allar (who’s out for the season after Saturday) – kinda’ like it would have been if the same had happened to Julian Sayin in a loss to Illinois. Gloom, despair, and agony in Columbus, come Sunday.
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Because…you remember last November, when the cries of, “Fire Ryan Day,” rang out after a fourth consecutive loss to Michigan. Six weeks later the Buckeyes were national champions!
So on Monday morning the talk shows were rife with what happened, and why? Why is there so much inconsistency in football where Penn State has bottomed out, and Michigan looked like a shanked punt Saturday in a futile loss to Southern Cal?
And if you want to lose your house, altogether, would you have bet on Indiana to beat Oregon on Saturday…and look dominating in doing it?
Where does it come from?
Well certainly the genesis of what we’re seeing in college football must start at the high school level, where it’s become increasingly hard to look at a team win predictably one week, then spiral out of control the next. Where all the stats, all the records, and all the instinct you have for development seem to be for nothing. On any given night you can no longer trust what you trusted last week. Not at Bug Tussle High School, and now we know…not at Penn State (3-3), Wisconsin (2-4), and not at UCLA (2-4).
All of these colleges, by the way, recruit from the same pool of high school athletes, and pay them millions. And they wouldn’t be at Penn State if someone didn’t think they could play.
Every Division I FBS school in America likes to believe that its football staff is capable of developmental football and a winning record. James Franklin wasn’t trying to lose to Oregon, UCLA and Northwestern this year. He just fattened up against Nevada, Florida International and Villanova before being led to the slaughter.
So what’s the issue? And why were so many people wrong about Penn State?
Well on Friday nights it’s never been tougher to see the same team three weeks in a row, predictably, as it’s become in 2025. And yes, it’s always been possible that teams you don’t expect can rise to the occasion to beat someone unexpectedly. But in the minds of those that will even admit it…it’s more probable that the culture of football is not as competitive, or committed from the bottom up as it was a decade ago – about the time that we started adding divisions and creating more opportunity for participation and trophies.
But what have we created, and are we surprised?
There’s no proof, some will say. But what more proof do you need?
Is Luke Fickell suddenly just a bad football coach at Wisconsin?
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Was James Franklin posing as an imposter for these past 12 years?
And did Michigan State hire Jonathan Smith away from Oregon State because they knew he might be 0-3 in the Big Ten after last weekend?
Is it entirely possible that Nick Saban’s psychic told him to get out now…and start doing those VRBO commercials?
Or can you explain why so many high school conferences in Ohio, top to bottom, average a .500 winning percentage? Or why ten of the twenty games played in the four principle conferences covered by Press Pros last Friday were decided by five touchdowns or more?
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, if that’s what you really want; and a lot of people say that .500 is good enough as long as more kids are getting a chance to be something they’ve never been. While on the other hand, people – lots of people – are scratching their heads trying to explain why their college football team is suddenly so unpredictable.
I, like many of them, don’t have the answer, nor the time to take a deeper dive at this point to find one. But time will tell. Time is telling. It always does.
The weeds grow up over the porch.
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