STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Back-to-back losses have the Nittany Lions slipping from No. 7 to No. 14 in this week's College Football Playoff rankings.
For a team that climbed as high as No. 2 in the AP Poll before losing to Ohio State and Michigan State in as many weeks, the Lions are ranked behind No. 12 Michigan State and No. 13 Ohio State. And, as if the Big Ten wasn't a jumbled mess of a conference, Northwestern checked in at No. 25 and Iowa, coming off the upset against Ohio State, is at No. 20.
That of course means Penn State has two wins against ranked opponents, but after what's transpired in the past two weeks the Lions are still on the outside looking in. Interestingly enough, the Lions are 2-2 against teams in this week's rankings, with all four of those games coming on the road.
Will this year's resume for Penn State with a soft non-conference schedule impact the Lions' future scheduling plans?
"To be honest with you, I get it, and I know this is something that media and fans talk about all the time. I'm definitely not talking about it, especially this week," James Franklin said Tuesday. "We're focused on Rutgers, and if we beat Rutgers, everything else will take care of itself. From a scheduling perspective all those things are looked at. Me and Sandy [Barbour] sit down and Phil [Esten], we all sit down and talk about all these different philosophies. The problem is there's no true model, because you may schedule someone right now and they are a completely different program by the time you play them."
Wisconsin is at No. 8 with a perfect 9-0, but the Badgers will need to get a signature win down the stretch here -- one that might not come until the Big Ten title game in Indianapolis. Surely they too will be getting plenty of questions about their schedule and whether or not they go undefeated and therefore deserve a spot in the Playoff or not.
Still, for Penn State to win out and finish the regular season at 10-2 and then make a push for a New Year's Six bowl game they'll need to tune out the noise that Franklin said his team wasn't "mature enough" to deal with. While Franklin was quick to add that he didn't think any team is ever prepared to handle the attention that comes with being in the types of national title conversations the Lions were with earlier this season, how they rebound against Rutgers, Nebraska and Maryland of course sets the stage for the bowl game.
That rebound has been so far, so good, Franklin said.
"All the feedback that I got from coaches, from players, from administration, it felt like my message after the game was good," Franklin said. "Looking at the guys' body language and things like that, it seemed like it was received well. I think last year we started to have some conversations that we hadn't had in the past and this year we had a little bit of conversations that we haven't had the past. And it kind of opened that door. Once that door was opened we started to have a little bit more of those conversations. ... It's not like we had gone far off that model or that formula. But we cracked the door open and when you do that you start to kind of hear more of it than you should."