The White Out Is One Of The Greatest Environments In All Of Sports, And Penn State Is Totally Wasting It

Isaiah Vazquez. Getty Images.

Penn State fans keep showing up to support this football team, and they keep getting let down. 

Last night, those fans set a new Beaver Stadium record, as a total of 114,419 people were in attendance for the spectacle that is the Penn State White Out. That's the fourth-largest crowd for any college football game ever, by the way. But of course, none of that matters if you don't win the fucking game. 

In fact, when you look at the five highest-attended games in Beaver Stadium history, all of them have resulted in Penn State losses. Ohio State in 2018? Loss. Michigan in 2023? Loss. Ohio State in 2024? Loss. Oregon last year? Loss. And now USC last night. A loss once again. 

But I wanna focus specifically on those final two games: Oregon last year and USC last night. Because unlike some other games on that list, both of those matchups were White Out games. And we, as a program, were clamoring for YEARS to be able to play teams of their caliber in the White Out again. 

We went through a weird three-season stretch where we had to settle for Minnesota, Iowa, and Washington as our White Out opponents. It sucked. We beat those teams, yeah, but nobody outside of State College gave a fuck about the games. The Washington matchup was on Peacock, for crying out loud. Welp, we finally got our wish of playing legit teams again last season, but we haven't done shit with that opportunity since. 

When all eyes were on us last year for a Top-10 showdown against Oregon, we pissed down our leg for the first three quarters. Took the raucous crowd out of the game entirely because our offense was so ass. Then last night, with a chance to turn the season around and get a signature win for our struggling head coach, it was the defense that was the problem. We couldn't tackle shit, and we let Jayden Maiva and USC do whatever they wanted on us. 

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The whole benefit of the White Out is that the Penn State defense should THRIVE in the noise. The crowd is doing whatever they can to get the opposing offense out of sorts, and our defense should be able to capitalize and feed off the energy in the building. But that wasn't the case at all last night. The noise just wound up being a mild nuisance for USC, because they knew this Penn State defense was barbecue chicken anyway. 

So now you walk away with another wasted opportunity to really make a statement to the college football world. Sure, we can dress up in white and pack a stadium. But we can't win the game when it matters. Last year, the White Out loss served as the beginning of the end for James Franklin in State College. Last night, it served as more ammunition for the anti-Matt Campbell crowd, which only puts more pressure on this new Penn State team to figure things out. 

I don't know where we go from here. I just know that the White Out has lost a lot of its mystique, and you're only gonna get it back by taking down these big-time programs. There hasn't been a White Out win of magnitude this decade, and I'm tired of seeing guys like Lincoln Riley and Dan Lanning celebrate on our field. In no way should these teams from the west coast be able to travel all the way across the country and win in that atmosphere with relative ease. The White Out used to be something that opposing teams feared. No one fears playing in the White Out anymore, though. Plain and simple. 

That's not the fans' fault. They're still doing whatever they can to create the most hostile environment in college football. Hell, they're showing up in bigger numbers than ever before, even when things are far from being lollipops and rainbows in Happy Valley. The fact of the matter is that this team isn't holding up their end of the bargain. And you can't keep expecting these fans to drop hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to attend these White Out games, just to see their team get outplayed and outcoached time and time again. 

This is clearly a transition year for the program. I still believe in Matt Campbell to turn things around. But if he is gonna be the guy to turn things around, the magic of the White Out absolutely NEEDS to be restored.