Penn State started the season ranked No. 2 in the AP Poll, and now is out of those rankings entirely.
The question wasn’t if Penn State would drop in the rankings, it was if the team that started the week ranked No. 7 would stay in the top 25.
It takes a lot for a team to drop that far, but a loss at 0-4 UCLA would be the type of thing to make that happen.
With Penn State at 3-2 and still without a single Power 4 win on Oct. 5, it would have been justifiable for it to fall completely out of the rankings.
That’s what happened in the AP Poll, with Penn State still being No. 23 in the Coaches Poll.
Regardless of where Penn State landed in the rankings, Saturday’s loss means that Penn State’s College Football Playoff chances are on life support.
PLAYOFF PROBABILITY
Photo by Matt Lynch, Nittany Sports Now
Penn State started the season with a 63.8% chance to make it to the College Football Playoff.
Now, those chances are way, way down, to 1.9%.
By definition, FPI is a “predictiverating system developed by ESPN that measures team strength and uses it to forecast game and season results in American football. Each team’s FPI rating is composed of predictive offensive, defensive, and special teams value, as measured by a function of expected points added (EPA). That rating is the basis for FPI’s game-level and season-level projections.”
THERE’S A CHANCE
Head Coach James Franklin at Penn State Football’s 2025 Photo Day.
To paraphrase Lloyd Christmas, there is a chance that Penn State makes it to the Playoff. It would require winning the last seven regular-season games, which include games at Ohio State and against Indiana at home, both of which are in the Top 10. It’s hard to find anything nice to say about Penn State football right now, but it is a team that did come within one defensive stop of besting No. 2 Oregon. So maybe these guys do have something up their sleeve.
The problem is, James Franklin has failed to get his team over the hump in Big Games, with Oregon being the latest example.
Right now, all Penn State can do is worry about Northwestern. That’s who it hosts Saturday on Homecoming at Beaver Stadium, with kickoff scheduled for 3:30 on FS1.
