Penn State beats Iowa at its own game, establishes itself among elite of college football

James Franklin wore a smile as he made his way to his team just before they began to sing the Penn State alma mater, arms hanging around his wife on one side and daughter on the other.

The head coach playfully leaped off his feet to force them to carry him for a moment as they giggled before his shoes gently touched the Beaver Stadium grass again. Franklin’s weight lifting off the ground bore a resemblance to the metaphorical weight coming off his team’s shoulders, even if it was just for a brief second.

The Nittany Lions passed their first major test of the season Saturday night, throttling Iowa 31-0 in the annual White Out and imposing its will on a program that takes pride in doing the same to others.

One of the quirks of the team’s schedule gives it a few weeks of rest between each pressure-filled game. This game with the Hawkeyes was the first clash with a team that should stack up with the Nittany Lions. But that didn’t stop them from dictating the terms.

Ask Penn State’s offensive players and they’ll tell you they seized control in the second half when the team ran down Iowa’s throats after a halftime adjustment.

But ask the defense, and the answer is much different.

“I think from the first drive we knew it,” defensive end Dani Dennis-Sutton said. “Once we felt how good their offensive line was coming off, I think we knew from then. But obviously once we got to halftime and it was 0 to whatever the score was, as a defensive line and a whole defense, we felt like it should be a shutout.”

There’s truth in both answers. The defense controlled the game from the outset, never allowing Iowa to take a snap in the red zone and very rarely allowing it onto its side of the 50. When it did find any success, the Nittany Lions took the ball back with a turnover, demoralizing an Iowa offense that needs its team to score 25 points per game just so the offensive coordinator — Brian Ferentz, son of head coach Kirk Ferentz — isn’t relieved of his duties.

Penn State’s offense found some success in the game’s first 30 minutes, but took over in the last half when it scored 21 points and utilized a ground-and-pound approach to dominate the Hawkeyes physically and mentally.

That is what the Hawkeyes try to do. They have an elite defense that doesn’t let teams beat them deep and swarms to everything in front of them. Saturday night, they were on the other side of that equation. There’s only so much a group can do when an offense continues to lean on them. Eventually, even a unit as great as Iowa’s will break.

“It’s just great,” Penn State running back Kaytron Allen said. “We all want to out-physical them. I feel like we got the best of them. ... We just came to play. We know what we were here for.”

What the Nittany Lions were in the stadium for was, apparently, pure dominance. On a day where top-15 teams around the country were pushed to their limit and even defeated, the Nittany Lions imposed their will on one of the most physically dominant defenses in the country.

By the end of the night it was the team across the field that was battered and broken, listless without a direction behind an offense that couldn’t do anything and a defense that bent and bent until it broke.

Dennis-Sutton knew the aforementioned control came from how the Nittany Lions were having success.

“I think we were just out-physical’ing them,” he said. “I think Iowa bases their whole persona on being the most physical and disciplined team. But I think we just out-physical’ed them and it’s as simple as that.”

The stats back it up. The Nittany Lions may not have rattled off massive chunk plays in the running game, but they were able to grind away at the Hawkeye defense with repeated blows in the running game. Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton combined for 121 yards on 39 carries in the game. Not the most efficient performance, but an effective one considering what it did to their opponent’s energy levels.

They played so effectively that they could feel Iowa losing its will to compete and fight on both sides of the ball.

“You could feel them losing their edge a little bit,” defensive end Chop Robinson said. “When you’re whooping the man every single play in front of you and then you got to line up against him again, it’s hard to keep bringing the same mentality and the same pressure every single time. I think once we brought that it was hard for them to stop.”

Taking control early also meant the team having the game in the bag in the third quarter. The kickoff unit had several players dancing to Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline as the stadium sang along with the score 24-0 and 1:01 on the clock in the third. It was only a three possession game, but the players surely knew what everyone in the stadium knew at that point.

The Nittany Lions had already defeated the Hawkeyes, and at that point it was just a matter of playing out the string.

It is, of course, just one game. And only the fourth one of the season at that. But Penn State remains at 4-0 with one of its three potential losses already in the win column. Matchups with Ohio State on the road and Michigan at home still loom in October and November, respectively.

The Nittany Lions have been here before.

In 2022 they were 5-0 leading into the Michigan game before getting their doors blown off in Ann Arbor.

In 2021 they were undefeated heading into a matchup against Iowa on the road before losing an injury-marred game that featured Iowa coaches mocking hurt Penn State players — a fact that, according to Dennis-Sutton, Franklin reminded his team of this week in the lead-up to Saturday night.

Those results don’t have to be the norm. It’s on this iteration of Penn State to make sure this group is different and can be among the elite of the elite nationally. If only for just one night, there was plenty of reason to believe that it can.