The schedule for Penn State football has taken on a trend in recent years. The team almost always starts the season with three consecutive non-conference bouts before beginning Big Ten play in late September.

That’s not inherently different from the rest of the sport, but it is notably different from the SEC starting conference play earlier and having every team play an FCS program in November for whatever reason.

The concept of a “preseason” for the rigors of Big Ten play is smart and what all good programs do, but the way Penn State is doing it starts to get old after a while.

This year, the Nittany Lions opened their season with games against Marshall, Temple, and Buffalo, who represent the Sun Belt, the American Conference, and the MAC, respectively. Those three conferences are considered some of the lower-quality conferences in the FBS. None of those teams entered 2026 with super high expectations.

It’d be fine if it were a one-off, but it’s been part of a management trend to intentionally schedule “cupcake opponents” to start each regular season, giving the football team a soft landing and three free wins on the calendar.

From 2025 to 2028, here’s the list of opponents that Penn State has played or is scheduled to play in non-conference action:

• 2025: vs. Nevada (Mountain West), vs. FIU (Conference USA), vs. Villanova (FCS)
• 2026: vs. Marshall (Sun Belt), at Temple (American), vs. Buffalo (MAC)
• 2027: vs. Syracuse (ACC), vs. Maine (FCS), vs. Temple (American)
• 2028: vs. Ball State (MAC), at Syracuse (ACC), vs. UMass (MAC)

There is a Power Four team on the schedule, as Penn State scheduled a home-and-home with Syracuse a few years ago, but such a matchup only has intrigue off the decades-old “rivalry” the two teams had.

If you count the pre-2019 continuous series against Pitt and the home-and-home with West Virginia in 2023-24, it seemed like Penn State was interested in renewing some of these old-school rivalries.

Here’s the thing, though. These matchups, particularly against Syracuse and Temple, as headliners for every non-conference slate, don’t work in modern college football. When you schedule these games to get a free win, fans lose interest.

The game against Buffalo was the least-attended non-COVID Penn State home game since 2019, a late November game against Rutgers.

The student section is half full by the second-half kickoff. There’s no interest or intrigue, and when the only expectation is to pummel the opponent by several touchdowns, anything less is treated as a failure.

Until recently, Penn State routinely scheduled a Power Four team in non-conference play, with matchups ranging from regional rivalries to intriguing games against opponents in unlikely areas. At one point in time, they had a slate that looked like this from 2018 to 2025:

• 2018: at Pitt
• 2019: vs. Pitt
• 2020: at Virginia Tech
• 2021: vs. Auburn
• 2022: at Auburn
• 2023: vs. West Virginia
• 2024: at West Virginia
• 2025: vs. Virginia Tech

This is an eight-year stretch of captivating opponents, and while six of them still occurred, the Virginia Tech home-and-home was canceled after COVID-19 wiped out the first leg. Then, instead of finding someone new to take the Hokies’ place, Franklin adopted a new strategy: no more competition, only cupcakes.

The 2025-28 stretch that we now have has been set in stone for several years. It was by design to play, essentially, a preseason to keep people healthy.

“It’s a little bit of strategy, and it’s a little bit of kind of the predicament we’re in,” Franklin said last season when asked about non-conference scheduling. “For us, we want to put ourselves in the best position to get into conference play as healthy and as confident as we possibly can be to make a run in conference play.”

Franklin has already worked his magic at Virginia Tech to schedule more of these easier opponents. He canceled the team’s game against Group of Six powerhouse James Madison for 2026 while backing out of future commitments with Liberty, another usual Group of Six contender, and South Carolina in the SEC.

He also removed two of the four scheduled meetings with Maryland down the road.

It’s going to be hard for Matt Campbell to rip up the 2027 and 2028 schedules because of the close proximity and the likely buyout situation, particularly with the buy games against lesser opponents, but he can get to work filling the 2029 and 2030 non-conference slates with something bold and exciting. Dozens of other schools have already begun scheduling into the 2030s.

If the College Football Playoff is inevitably going to expand even further, why not just designate one game a year to challenge ourselves with a nationally-covered game?

We see Michigan and Ohio State scheduling some of the beasts in the SEC; why not call up Lane Kiffin and have a home-and-home with LSU to see who really has the best home environment?

Why not take trips to cool new places? Seeing the Nittany Lions play at Jordan-Hare Stadium in 2022 was awesome, and there’s a whole new world to experience when you open your horizons to competing with other Power Four schools.

I’m not even opposed to the regional rivalry series. The banter surrounding the West Virginia games was fun, even if the matchups were quite lopsided. The animosity in the hate triangle between Penn State, West Virginia, and Pitt still exists, so why not try to play them more?

I don’t even care that much about the history of a bygone era with Pitt; it’s just something fun you can do when you don’t have any better options.

Hell, go play Notre Dame. We’ve seen all these old Joe Paterno-era rivals over the last decade, but we can’t seem to lace them up with the Fighting Irish, who were one of Penn State’s big rivals when it came to regional supremacy for several decades.

The CFP Semifinal two years ago was like a relic of a bygone era, with two rabid fanbases that mirror each other in a lot of ways.

Look, I can appreciate a tune-up game on a sleepy Saturday. Sometimes, I just want to see the blue and white roll to a win without worrying about anything. It makes for a peaceful day and gives alumni cheap opportunities to see their alma mater, given how expensive typical games can get, but there’s no reason you need three of them every year.

All I’m asking is for one fun non-conference game every year. Fun isn’t visiting the Kibble Dome or Lincoln Financial Field. Fun is uncharted waters, testing yourselves, or maybe rekindling some old hatred from 50 years ago.