Why Is Penn State Playing Kent State This Week? It’s a Long Story
When Penn State scheduled a non-conference football game against Kent State in 2019, it could not have forseen playing a team coming off a 71-0 loss in which it was offered a second-half running clock. Yet here the Nittany Lions are, hosting Kent State in a game that features the most lopsided line of college football’s Week 4 schedule.
No. 10 Penn State is a 49-point favorite over Kent State, according to DraftKings, which marks the Nittany Lions’ largest betting line since at least 1995. According to the ESPN College Football Power Index, Kent State (0-3) ranks last among the nation’s 134 college football teams after losing by 71 points at Tennessee last weekend. Penn State (2-0) enters the game at No. 9 in the FPI following a bye.
“When you schedule these opponents, typically five and seven years out, you don’t know what you’re going to get,” Penn State coach James Franklin said Monday at his weekly press conference. “You schedule a MAC team, and some of [those] teams … have caused people fits, and then you can get to a year where someone is struggling. So that is unpredictable and challenging.”
Even more unpredictable was what led to the Penn State-Kent State game happening now. Basically, it’s a reschedule of a schedule change, impacted by the SEC and COVID, that looks much different five years after the contracts were signed.
The road to this point began in 2019, when Penn State had to address a newly vacant opening date on its planned 2020 football schedule after Kent State made a change. Kent State originally was scheduled to begin the 2020 season at Arkansas, part of a three-game non-conference tour of the SEC that also included games at Kentucky and Alabama. But according to a 2019 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette story, Kent State was “leery of playing three SEC games in the first month next season.”
So in 2019, Arkansas and Penn State evidently made a trade. Arkansas would host Nevada, Penn State’s originally scheduled 2020 season-opening opponent, and Kent State would visit Penn State instead. The issue seemed solved. And then the COVID-19 pandemic altered college football schedules nationwide.
Penn State canceled its non-conference games, Kent State among them, and played a nine-game Big Ten football schedule in 2020. Penn State and Kent State then rescheduled their game for this season. Which leads to Saturday.
Kent State wasn’t a MAC power when this game initially was contracted in 2019 but had shown positive signs. The Golden Flashes went 2-10 during the 2018 season and improved to 7-6 the following year, winning the 2019 Frisco Bowl. Kent State went 3-1 during the shortened 2020 season and won 12 games during the 2021-22 campaigns under head coach Sean Lewis, who left to become Colorado’s offensive coordinator in 2023 (he’s now the head coach at San Diego State).
