Don’t look now, folks. The Nittany Lions have won three in a row.

Penn State football dismantled the Minnesota Golden Gophers on its return to Beaver Stadium following its longest away trip of the season. The Nittany Lions rode another stellar Carson Hansen display and an elite defensive performance en route to their sixth win.

That means December football.

“We definitely talked about it a ton. The biggest thing, we just want to win. Every game. Anyone, whoever it is, we want to win,” defensive tackle Dallas Vakalahi said postgame. “We knew that a byproduct of winning was going to be the bowl, which is an exciting thing to have now.”

It’s not that long ago the Nittany Lions were 0-4 to open Matt Campbell’s Big Ten account after a horrendous outing against Michigan in the Big House. Penn State looked and felt aimless offensively and lacked discipline on the defensive side of the ball.

Rocco Becht was at his worst, morale felt at an all-time low, and Penn State faced true disaster in Campbell’s first year at the helm. Bowl eligibility wasn’t really even in question.

That was until the Nittany Lions came out with renewed intensity and took care of Purdue at home after their bye week, powered by Cam Wallace’s breakout game. That momentum turned into a gritty fourth-quarter win over Washington in Seattle, which ultimately led to Penn State’s magnum opus of the season so far against Minnesota.

The Nittany Lions had College Football Playoff expectations heading into the year. While those died swiftly, clinching bowl eligibility added a sweet sense of satisfaction for the squad after its horrendous start in conference action.

“It’s exciting to be able to get one more game, not only for the team, but for our seniors,” Vakalahi said. “I think we owe a lot to our seniors and the seniors who stayed here, and who came, and just being able to play with them one more time means a ton.”

Campbell credited Penn State’s week-to-week improvements as the driving force towards the Nittany Lions’ resurgence as a force in the Big Ten.

While it may be too late to scare the rest of the conference in 2026, the strong end to the year is a sign of the tenacity this coaching staff has to offer. It was down and out, but bowl eligibility is a tangible achievement to show for it.

“I don’t think I’ve wavered from my belief in what this football team can become and who they were. I think there’s been a lot that this group, coaching staff included, has had to work through to just navigate this whole journey,” Campbell said. “I said it from the beginning that we weren’t going to shortcut this process … I think this group’s got a chance to put a powerful statement together.”

Nevertheless, Penn State can’t be too quick to hang its hat on achieving bowl eligibility. That doesn’t come until December.

In today’s age of college football, things can change at the flip of a switch. Penn State has maintained improvement, but it has to harbor a “job not finished” mentality heading into the final stretch.

That’s especially necessary with how talented and deep the Big Ten is. All of that improvement can be instantly unraveled.

“For us, we’re going to take it game by game now. We still got two more games. We want to win eight games this year. That’s the goal right now. That’s where our eyes are … We got to be prepared for next week and the week after,” Becht said.

The first of those two remaining contests is Rutgers for Senior Day at Beaver Stadium. The Nittany Lions faced an insane amount of roster turnover with James Franklin’s firing and Campbell’s subsequent hiring — even for the standard college football roster nowadays — but they managed to find a way to make something out of an 0-4 hole, and that’s credit to the senior class.

Without the trust placed in the players to figure it out and make genuine strides from the Northwestern beatdown to grinding the Golden Gophers down, Penn State could still be spiraling with no end in sight.

“An opportunity to honor that group, whether they stayed here at Penn State or whether they came here to finish their career here at Penn State, I think what they’ve stood for is why we’re sitting here today with a three-game winning streak,” Campbell said. “If that group wavers, I don’t think you have any shot. They demanded a way forward.”

Penn State did the hard part. It can reap the gratification of winning the right to play one more game in some fancy stadium outside of the usual grounds.

But the real fulfillment comes from the aftermath of Wisconsin, Northwestern, USC, and Michigan. What good is success if it doesn’t come after struggle?

“No one ever complained. No one ever pointed fingers. There was a lot of inward looking… Everyone came to practice every day. Win, loss, whatever the result was,” linebacker Kooper Ebel said. “We weren’t results-driven. We were just process-oriented, and it’s paid off.”

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