College Football Playoff stage was too big for SMU QB Kevin Jennings against Penn State

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — It was a given that, with the Mustangs venturing into Happy Valley for a playoff date with Penn State and 106,000 fans, SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings could not afford to relive the rough start he endured in the ACC championship game. As it turned out, SMU fans would have killed for a repeat of his Clemson game. Yet even after Jennings threw two pick-sixes in the first half (to Penn State linebackers, no less), SMU was given one temporary reprieve when Nittany Lions Coach James Franklin lost his mind and gambled on a fourth-and-one at his own 19-yard line. I know it‘s trendy to do these things, but Penn State had shown almost no running game to this point, and when SMU held the line, the Mustangs had the shortest field they would have all day. And three plays later… Jennings threw his third interception of the first 22 minutes. “I had a terrible game,” Jennings said. “I made mistakes three times with the ball.” The third gave Penn State one more chance to ignite its offense and once that happened, SMU’s first College Football Playoff appearance was a complete disaster. The Mustangs trailed 28-0 at the half and went on to lose by a 38-10 count at Beaver Stadium. Was this stage too big for the Mustangs? It certainly was for Jennings, who was able to overcome his two first-quarter turnovers against Clemson by scoring four touchdowns and throwing for more than 300 yards. But this wasn’t a three-loss Clemson team on a (fairly) neutral field. SMU never played in front of a crowd larger than the 53,808 they saw in Charlotte two weeks ago, but the Nittany Lions packed 106,013 fans into their frigid stadium, creating a white-out nightmare for the visitors. Rhett Lashlee lapsed briefly into coach speak in the postgame news conference, suggesting SMU had played Penn State to within a 17-10 score if you just erase the second quarter. But give him credit for being realistic about what had taken place, how a missed opportunity had grown into the controversy No. 11 seeded SMU was hoping to avoid after getting the last at-large invite over Alabama, Ole Miss and the rest. Clemson was No. 12 but the Tigers were automatically in as a conference champion. ”It is what it is. We didn’t play well enough to say anything against what’s going to be written and said about us,” Lashlee said. “People will say, ‘Should they have been in, do they belong?’ And that’s fine, you’re welcome to write it [because] we didn’t play very good today. But this is a quality team, we deserved to be here.” For nine weeks, Jennings was the former champion from South Oak Cliff who could seemingly do no wrong, even when he did a lot wrong (five turnovers in a win at Duke). But that unbeaten streak against teams currently unranked was flushed in a hurry Saturday. Penn State’s wins aren’t necessarily more impressive than SMU‘s but the Nittany Lions showed their staying power in close losses to Oregon and Ohio State. And with the CFP granting home-field advantage to the teams seeded five through eight this weekend, it’s not a shock that one-sided results are being produced here and in South Bend and Austin. Having said that, Jennings and SMU cannot play this poorly in their biggest game and expect to be absolved of criticism. Both these teams lost their conference title games and yet, on this particular afternoon, one of them proved to be 28 points better than the other one. By halftime. That doesn’t mean the sixth-place team in the Big Ten would run over the best in the ACC, but it also serves as an appropriate “welcome to the big time” moment for the Mustangs. For four months and 13 games, there was nothing about their elevation from the American Athletic Conference to the ACC that suggested SMU was in over its head. Just about everything in Saturday’s game proved to be exactly that. So a team that was riding high with an 11-1 record and a potential No. 3 seed in the playoff goes out in humbling fashion with back-to-back losses. Comparing scores is a dangerous business, but this was much more like Penn State’s wins at home against Maryland and Washington than how they fared against Illinois or UCLA. Still, it’s the final chapter in an awfully impressive book for the Mustangs. Picked to finish in the middle of the ACC pack, they ran through the conference schedule undefeated. Lashlee will continue to master the portal and Jennings, despite these last two games, figures to draw plenty of national pre-season attention for what he achieved in his first 11 college starts. ”They have raised the standard of SMU football in Year One in the ACC," Lashlee said. Louisville and Pitt and even Clemson wouldn‘t argue with that. But the college game’s loudest voices come out of the Big Ten and the SEC, and there are decades of success to explain why that is. In SMU‘s first try at the 12-team playoff, the Mustangs came up way short of proving their worth. ”Maybe in the future we’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt because of the way we performed today,” Lashlee said. “So it’s our job to do what we should have done [against Clemson] and go out and win the championship and get the bye.” Find more SMU coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.