Penn State Basketball’s 2021-22 Big Ten Schedule Released

Penn State’s 2021-2022 men’s basketball schedule is now complete, as the Big Ten officially announced earlier today their conference schedule, which the program’s social media accounts pushed out.

This announcement comes on the heels of last week’s announcement by PSU regarding the completion of the non-conference portion of the schedule and hoo boy, is that conference opener against Ohio State going to be a doozy! I can already picture the chorus of boos that will shower upon Jamari Wheeler when he shows up to the Bryce Jordan Center wearing a scarlet and grey jersey. The team also has themselves a rough opening stretch with OSU, a trip to Sparty, and home games against Indiana and Purdue sandwiched in between a road trip to Northwestern.

Sadly, the Purdue home game on Saturday, January 8th is your only chance to make a weekend road trip up to Happy Valley to watch the Shrews Crew in action. There is a Friday night home game February 25th for the rubber match against Northwestern, but that’s unlikely an option for most out-of-towners. Speaking of Northwestern, them and Minnesota appear to be consensus bottom two in the Big Ten by the media, so getting home-and-homes with both of them should help pad that conference win total. One-plays against Wisconsin, Michigan, Maryland and Purdue are ideal, and provide an opportunity to spring a Quadrant 1 win in the NET rankings if the team can spring an upset in any of them, as they did last year by beating the Badgers at home and sweeping the Terps.

With a mixture of several new faces from the transfer portal and tried-and-true veterans, I feel confident in proclaiming that Micah Shrewsberry should have a more successful first year of Big Ten play than his previous couple of predecessors, as he has a team fully capable of competing in this league.