Football: Penn State YPP analysis

It’s no secret that Penn State’s non-conference schedule leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, our good friend Brian from the Penn State sister site Black Shoe Diaries made sure to mention this without

prompt in our Q&A exchange earlier this week.

Obviously, this presents some challenges in trying to preview this week’s game as without any kind of meaningful test it’s difficult to know how good the 2025 Penn State Nittany Lions really are.

At the same time Oregon is also rather untested, despite at least attempting to schedule something of a challenge, and as a result I have spent a good amount of time this young season trying to extract something from these games where it is difficult to do so because of a significant talent gap.   

This week I’m switching things up a bit and shining the interrogation lamp from Oregon to Oregon’s opponent. To do so we need to first go over a brief recent history lesson on the Penn State program.

James Franklin has been head coach of the Nittany Lions since the 2014 season. After 2 textbook rebuilding years the 2016 season was a breakthrough season for Franklin and the Lions as they exploded onto the national scene thanks to a super fun offence run by old friend Joe Moorhead that had dynamic players like Saquon Barkley, Trace McSorley, and Chris Godwin. Ever since then Penn State has been one of the 5-15 best teams in all of college football often in contention for the Big Ten Championship, New Years 6 bowl games, and playoff appearances (aside from a brief program re-set that took place in 2020 and 2021). Jokes aside about big game James Franklin, Penn State has been remarkably consistent at being near the top of college football.

This year the expectations are no different. In fact if expectations are any different this year it’s because many national pundits believe this is the year for Penn State based on what Penn State returned and what their biggest competitors didn’t.

Ok that is all the history you need to know, I told you it would be relatively brief.

This season Penn State has played two FBS teams with an F+ score of -1.01 or worse and FCS Villanova. For context the BEST team Penn State has played this season is FIU who ranks 115 out of 136 FBS teams.

What I have done is I looked at every team Penn State has played since 2016 that either had a F+ score of -1.01 or worse or was an FCS team and pulled the final YPP differential from raw stats to see if Penn State has been thoroughly dominating their over-matched opponents on a level that previous national title contender Penn State teams have, or if there is any difference in how they are performing this year versus previous years.

Since 2016 and including the early part of this season Penn State has played 15 either actual or virtual “pay-check” games. Here is the YPP differential in all 15 of those games plotted along the left-hand side as a bar graph and the number of games Penn State would go on to win that regular season plotted on the right hand side plotted as a line.

Here are my biggest takeaways from examining this chart:

1. Like I said Penn State has been remarkably consistent with between 9 and 11 regular season wins in 6 of the past 8 seasons. With the exceptions being the 2020 and 2021 seasons. That 2021 season is important for later so take note of it.
2. For a stretch of 4 pay-check games from 2017 to 2019 Penn State was quite consistent in these type of games as they thoroughly dominated their opponent as you would expect them too
3. But starting with a game against a historically bad Rutgers team in 2019 the results began to vary considerably in these types of games. Which is surprising to me because based on win total the quality of Penn State has not varied considerably

It was at this point that I had the idea that potentially some of these Penn State teams from 2019 to 2024 were paper tigers and others were legitimate title contenders but for one reason or another Penn State always wound up with 10 or 11 wins. Put another way Penn State always got lucky when their team was slightly worse than normal and always got unlucky when their team was slightly better than normal.

Here is that same chart but instead I have replaced Penn State’s regular season win total with their F+ score from that season.

While there is a little bit more of variance in Penn State’s annual F+ score season to season versus their win loss total that is obviously to be expected as F+ is more specific then a win loss record, F+ still says Penn State has been a remarkably consistent team and there performance in pay-check games on a per play basis isn’t a good indicator of relative team strength. For reasons that would probably turn this article into a novel Penn State just doesn’t seem interested in going full throttle in these games like they used to under Franklin despite the quality of the team.

How do I know this? Well thankfully for my purposes Penn State did have that one off year in 2021 in which they went 7-5 in the regular season and posted their worst F+ score of this era at 0.99 and therefore is the worst Penn State team in my data set.

That season they played FCS Villanova and outgained the Wildcats by 3.16 yards per play. Since then every single Penn State team has been better than the 2021 team both by regular season wins and F+ score. And yet that 2021 game is the median YPP performance in pay-check games from 2021 to present:

1. 2024 Kent State YPP Differential +7.33 – 11 Wins – Final F+ Score 1.92
2. 2023 Umass YPP Differential +5.04 – 10 Wins – Final F+ Score 1.81
3. 2025 Villanova YPP Differential +3.90 – TBD – TBD
4. 2024 Purdue YPP Differential +3.72 – 11 Wins – Final F+ Score 1.92
5. 2021 Villanova YPP Differential +3.16 – 7 Wins – Final F+ Score 0.99
6. 2023 Delaware YPP Differential +2.53 – 10 Wins – Final F+ Score 2.53
7. 2025 FIU YPP Differential +2.36 – TBD – TBD
8. 2025 Nevada YPP Differential +2.27 – TBD – TBD
9. 2022 CMU YPP Differential +0.84 – 10 Wins – Final F+ Score 1.67

This list presents a bit of an ink-blot test for you the reader. The optimistic Duck fan will look at this list and see that 2 of Penn State’s 2025 performances in Pay-check games occupy 3 of the bottom spots on this list and you can say, jeez Penn State has not looked as good as they should have against lesser competition.

The more nervous Duck fan will look at this list and see that since the worst Penn State team of this era occupies the dead middle Penn State’s performance in pay-check games isn’t predictive of a successful Nittany Lion season.

If you are forcing me to lean one way or another, I think this data should be encouraging for us Duck fans and discouraging for Penn State fans. The way I see it is Penn State has had 3 opportunities to have a Captain America Esque sparring session against a body bag like they did against Kent State last year, or Umass the year before, and they just haven’t.

Meanwhile Oregon has been pounding the bag so hard that, like our friend Steve, the Ducks have had to put another bag on every week.

All of that doesn’t mean anything though because on Saturday these teams are done sparring and step into the ring for a heavy weight tilt.