It’s no secret that the 2026-27 Penn State athletics season has been a disaster. Unsurprisingly, most of the attention in mid-October is on the football team, but arguably even more alarming for me has been the abysmal start for the men’s hockey team. Penn State has started the season 0-4 for the second time in program history, with the only other instance coming in the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season.
Just over a year ago, I was excited to see what stronger recruiting could bring to a Penn State program
that did not have enough depth to close the talent gap between itself and the perennial top teams in the sport. The last two seasons have produced- on paper- the most talented rosters Penn State has ever had.
“On paper” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
It feels like the program is losing its identity. When I was at Penn State (2016-2020), the rosters were nowhere near as talented on paper, but the team was much more cohesive. The forwards had very good chemistry and they frequently could roll four scoring lines. They were not elite defensively, but they were also far more reliable in their own zone than they are now. Penn State was regularly one of the least-penalized teams from 2016-2025.
Compare that to the last two seasons. The defensive play has fallen off a cliff, and there does not seem to be any rhythm in the offensive zone. The team is increasingly reliant on a handful of players to score and the depth scoring has dried up. Guy Gadowsky’s play style has always been high-event, but the last 40+ games has brought that to a whole new level. It’s messy. It’s sloppy. Worst of all, it’s undisciplined. Penn State led the country with over 18 penalty minutes per game last season. Gadowsky himself summed it up in his press conference last night:
This is a program that used to succeed because the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I am not seeing that anymore. And if I can see it, Gadowsky can clearly see it too. This will either be an inflection point or a sign of things to come. People will wishcast by saying the Frozen Four team struggled early in the season before they figured it out, but this is not the same thing. That team struggled when conference play hit, but they took care of business against weaker opponents. Hopefully I will be proven wrong about the state of this program by spring, but Penn State has a lot of work to do to turn this thing around.
