On3 Roundtable: Nine-win season is Penn State’s floor in 2023

Penn State is fixing to make plenty of noise in the Big Ten come fall, with a loaded defense and oodles of promising talent on offense returning. The Nittany Lions are in such a good spot that Sean Fitz of Blue and White Illustrated suspects a reasonable floor for this squad would be nine wins.

Realistically, Fitz thinks Penn State is a 10-win team, assuming they should beat every opponent outside of Michigan and Ohio State. The matter of Penn State’s ceiling and beating Big Ten East rivals is a separate discussion, but there’s no reason the Nittany Lions shouldn’t be nipping at their heels in 2023.

“They’ve gotten back to where the expectation is the two-game season with Ohio State and Michigan. Nobody in the building is going to tell you that, but James Franklin came out and said, they’re preparing for Ohio State and Michigan. This is June and I think it was back in May when he said that,” Fitz said to On3’s J.D. PicKell during a recent On3 Roundtable. “So that tells you where this mindset is for this team. They think they have a window, they think they have a very talented roster. Can’t slip up, obviously, but those are the two marquee games on the schedule.”

Outside of those two Big Ten East foes, Fitz highlighted a number of potentially tricky games for Penn State in 2023.

Games against Michigan State (played in Detroit), vs. Iowa, vs. West Virginia, at Illinois and at Northwestern all jumped out to Fitz. And the Wildcats, despite winning one game last season, stuck out to Fitz for a specific reason.

“You get to play in Detroit on Black Friday against Michigan State. We’ll see how their depth holds up to the end of the season. So that’s an interesting one. Illinois I mentioned. Iowa should bounce back a little bit. Northwestern is tricky in the sense that Northwestern played Penn State pretty well last year. It was in a monsoon, but Northwestern played Penn State pretty well last year,” Fitz said.

But absent another juggernaut on the schedule like Michigan or Ohio State, Fitz thinks it’s safe to pick Penn State to win double-digit games. He set the floor one game lower, at nine, to account for the fact that the 2023 probably won’t go off without a hitch or as well as the Nittany Lions dreamt of.

“There have been times when Penn State has struggled coming off a bye, struggled coming off a loss. These things that make college football as unpredictable as it is, sometimes. And so that’s why I think the floor is probably nine, but this is a double-digit win team from a talent perspective,” Fitz said.