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Penn State Ranked Inside the Top 20 in Preseason AP Poll
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Let’s get it back to college football with the first AP poll:
Indiana was ranked 20th at the start of last season, then went 16-0 to win the Natty. Penn State was ranked 2nd and lost Drew Allar to injury while firing James Franklin en route to a 7-6 season.
So the preseason polls meant very little to begin with, then you throw in all of the transfers in the NIL era and it can be like throwing darts at a board.
But it’s still exciting because we’re starving for football, and what the Eagles and Ravens gave us on Saturday night was hardly football. So we turn to Week 1 in the college game, when TCU will beat the brakes off Bill Belichick’s North Carolina Tar Heels. Then Penn State opens seven days later against the Marshall Thundering Turd out of the Sun Belt. PSU has a new coach in Matt Campbell who brought a ton guys from Iowa State with him, including QB Rocco Becht. We don’t know how good they’re going to be, but we do know that they do not have a difficult schedule, and bettors hammered the UNDER 9.5 win total so hard that they moved the line down to 8.5, which looks like this on Kalshi:
Penn State doesn’t play a preseason top 10 team this season. They don’t have Ohio State, Oregon, or Indiana on the schedule. They’ve got #14 USC at home and then #16 Michigan and #17 Washington on the road. They’re right there at #18, in that second tier of Big 10 schools. Even if they were to lose all three of those games, they can finish 9-3 by beating Marshall, Temple, Buffalo, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Purdue, Minnesota, Rutgers, and Maryland.
We shall see!
(Temple did not receive votes)
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com