Northwestern handed off, Penn State's defensive line got moved off the ball again and again, and the Wildcats finished with a season-high 413 rushing yards in a 34-13 win Friday night. Penn State had been allowing roughly 113 rushing yards a game. Tony Rojas chased it down for career highs of 12 tackles and 3.5 tackles for loss, freshman corner Josiah Zayas recovered a fumble that set up Penn State's first touchdown, and almost nothing else on that side of the ball worked. Matt Campbell, afterward, gave one continuous answer. "The standard of what this program plays football with, the attitude, the effort, the toughness. We lacked it in every way, shape, and form tonight, and I put that, and I put a lot of that on me."
That is the week D'Anton Lynn carries into the most personal game on his schedule. Lynn played corner at Penn State from 2008 to 2011, then spent 2024 and 2025 running USC's defense under Lincoln Riley, cutting the Trojans from 34.4 points allowed per game in 2023 to 24.1 in his first season there. No. 19 USC visits Beaver Stadium on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. on NBC, and Penn State enters Week 6 unranked.
What Lynn's front has to prove
Lynn's unit opened the season holding Marshall to 44 net rushing yards on 26 attempts. Five games later, that version of the defense has not shown up against a Big Ten offensive line. The thing to watch is simple and physical. It is whether Penn State's interior defenders hold their ground on first down instead of getting displaced, and whether the tackling that failed at Ryan Field holds up with 107,000 people screaming. Lynn knows the staff on the other sideline and whatever they kept from his two years there. That cuts both ways, and it is worth nothing at all if the line of scrimmage goes the way it went last week.
Campbell was hired in December 2025 as Penn State's 17th head coach after a decade at Iowa State, where he became the winningest coach in program history and won three Big 12 Coach of the Year awards. A White Out win over a ranked team would be the first real evidence the rebuild travels into conference play.
The offense is not helping the defense
Penn State ran for 48 rushing yards against Northwestern, while Becht passed for 243 yards with a touchdown and two interceptions. The ground game that produced 304 yards against Buffalo in Week 3 has not shown up in either Big Ten game, and a defense getting moved off the ball needs an offense that can hold the ball. Quinton Martin Jr. is part of that picture. He played seven snaps and carried three times for six yards. Koby Howard, meanwhile, played no snaps for a second straight game, so the question of whether he becomes the primary target stays on hold; he has suggested a possible return at Michigan on Oct. 17.
Center Brock Riker played 51 snaps against Northwestern and tight end Andrew Rappleyea 45, a second straight week with both on the field for essentially the whole game.
Saturday is Penn State's White Out, a tradition dating to 2004; the Lions are 13-8 in them. The model gives Penn State a 66% chance to win at home. Take it and the playoff picture reads about 15.8%, with an average seed near 9.2; lose it and the same math falls to roughly 3.1% and a seed around 10. Those are two different seasons, not two stages of one.
Iowa at Washington: root for Washington
Washington hosts No. 20 Iowa on Friday night, and a Huskies win is the one outside result worth tracking. Iowa sits in the same Big Ten standings race Penn State is trying to climb back into, so every conference loss Iowa takes is one fewer team stacked ahead. Washington's chances sit at 50%, essentially a coin flip, and the payoff is modest, about 1.3 percentage points of playoff odds. Penn State visits Washington in Week 10, so a Huskies win also sharpens the résumé value of that trip later. Watch it if you are up; nothing here changes what Saturday night means.
For the full picture, see the interactive guide and the methodology.