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Penn State football comfortably advanced through the first round of the College Football Playoff on Saturday with a 38-10 win over SMU. The Nittany Lions, despite the chilly weather, looked right at home — probably because they were.

A lot happened in Beaver Stadium’s first-ever postseason home game, so let’s dig into what our football writers noticed.

Beaver Stadium Misses Out On Sell-Out

Let’s get this out of the way — Beaver Stadium was about 500 fans short of a sell-out crowd for a playoff game. In many ways, that’s a tough pill to swallow — this year’s group of fans broke the attendance record against Ohio State. In other ways, it was cold, finals week was over, and Penn State was pretty heavily favored in this one.

Even missing a possible 5,000 fans, Beaver Stadium still made an impact. SMU’s offense looked shaken up in a harsh introduction to wintertime Big Ten football, and SMU suffered a few false starts thanks to the student section.

Walking In A Winter Wonderland

Penn State fans, or at least some of them, had prayed for a snowy, cold game against SMU. With a team from Texas coming up north, the idea was that the cold would play a significant role and make the Mustangs uncomfortable.

Well, it certainly made fans uncomfortable, but SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings said postgame that the weather was a non-factor. The person who suffered the most may have been James Franklin, who looked more miserable than we’ve seen him in a long time postgame.

Did The SMU Band Need Passports To Get Up There?

Plenty of oddities came with the first round of the playoffs, the least of which was not where the SMU band had to sit.

Normally, Penn State will put a visiting band behind the north end zone in a designated section. However, with the playoffs running the show, the SMU band was stuck in the upper section behind that north end zone where away fans usually sit. The band wasn’t allowed to play outside of halftime, though that show wasn’t bad.

In other news: Here’s SMU’s marching band at the very top of Beaver Stadium. pic.twitter.com/5sTgh65m9Q

— Onward Sports (@OnwardStSports) December 21, 2024

SMU Fans Take Over Piece Of Student Section

Whether Penn State students did or did not request their full allotment of tickets — a question that remains up for debate, the student section was not full. With many students done with classwork for several days, they took off for home instead of sticking around State College for the game.

In their stead, several rows of SMU fans took a piece of WA. While this seemed like trouble waiting to happen initially, the game wasn’t competitive enough at any point to start any fights between the two sides.

SMU Hype Videos

Another oddity of the playoffs: Penn State was required to play one SMU pregame hype video. Penn State Athletics didn’t really do anything odd about it, but it ended up being a non-event.

It was certainly strange to watch another team’s video played in Beaver Stadium, and the video received heavy boos from fans, but nobody really seemed to care after the video ended.

Farewell, Part Of Beaver Stadium

While work was already done to get Beaver Stadium ready to host games in December, the real work on $700 million worth of renovations starts…now. The west side of the stadium will come first, and the Bevaer Stadium press box will come down (good). As our football beat reminisced on the field postgame, we heard some employees saying demolition was scheduled for 9 p.m. that night. Talk about a head start.

Our beat has had some good times in the press box, as have previous beats before it. It’s only right that we honored some alumni when we signed our desks with everyone else. Please direct all complaints about handwriting my way.