Follow-ing Geary Claxton's season-ending injury last week, most fans wrote off Penn State basketball for yet another year.
And judging by Wednesday night's 64-42 drubbing at home to Purdue, it looks like it may be another lost season in Happy Valley.
The players and coach Ed DeChellis are not willing to give up though, and have said all the right things since the injury. They have insisted their goal of making the NCAA tournament has not changed despite losing Claxton, who was arguably more valuable to Penn State than any other single player was to any team in the country.
"We're not changing our goals or who we want to be because we lost a player," DeChellis said after the Purdue game. "I don't feel that's fair to our program or anybody else on the team."
It certainly is admirable and necessary for DeChellis to maintain a positive outlook on the season, but there is nothing wrong with lowering his expectations now that Claxton is gone.
That's how Purdue coach Matt Painter handled a similar situation two years ago. In 2005, Painter lost his two best players, Carl Landry and David Teague, to anterior cruciate ligament injuries (Lions fans likely remember Landry as the guy who put up 26 points at the Bryce Jordan Center last season).
However, Painter took a different approach to dealing with injuries to his stars.
Painter said the key to maintaining a positive attitude among his players was to set small, reachable benchmarks for his team. He said leading at halftime against Michigan State that year was like a victory, even though the team ended up losing the game.
"But, you have to be positive. The one thing you have to get is big-time effort," Painter said. "When you lose a Carl Landry or you lose a Geary Claxton, you get that effort, and I always say you can't kick the dog. You get the maximum effort from the guys that you have and you go to war and you battle. It did not help us that year, but it helped us the next year."
Painter's patience paid off the year after, as the Boilermakers made the NCAA tournament
Last night, however, the effort was not apparent for the Lions. The Lions didn't hang around like they did in the Wisconsin game last Tuesday, and they certainly didn't make the Boilermakers sweat, like they did against Indiana on Sunday.
The feelings around the program are anything but positive, and it has to be pretty tough for the players to maintain an optimistic outlook with their goal of making the NCAA tournament becoming less and less likely with every game.
That's why the Lions need to adjust their goals.
Penn State was a long shot to make the NCAA tournament with Claxton. Without him, they are simply not a team capable of competing at a national level. Losing Claxton changed the entire makeup of the team, and that's why there is no shame in shooting for the NIT instead of the NCAA.
The Lions may not be capable of making noise at a national level, but they are far from dead as far as the Big Ten is concerned.
A reasonable goal for this team would be to win a game in the Big Ten tournament and earn a berth in the NIT. Perhaps another goal should be to pull off an upset over one of the conference's powerhouses. Indiana, Ohio State and Michigan State all still have to play at the Bryce Jordan Center this season.
Earning an NIT berth would likely require at least six more wins, which would give Penn State eight wins in the Big Ten.
Achieving those goals would be a tremendous accomplishment for this team considering that it lost its best player more than halfway through the season, and considering the fact that Penn State won only two conference games all of last year and has earned only one NIT bid in DeChellis' tenure.
It would give freshmen Talor Battle, Jeff Brooks and D.J. Jackson valuable experience and confidence and would lay the groundwork for an NCAA bid next year.
It may be unfair to downgrade expectations in the middle of the season, but it's even more unfair to expect this group to make the Big Dance without Claxton.
