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Ohio State Buckeyes running back Quinshon Judkins (1) runs around Penn State Nittany Lions safety Jaylen Reed (1) during a Big Ten football game at Beaver Stadium. Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

What Happens to the Penn State-Ohio State Rivalry After 2025?

Originally posted on Penn State Nittany Lions on SI
By Ben Jones | Last updated Oct 29, 2025 12:00 PM ET

Penn State and Ohio State. A complicated rivalry? An annual game? Conference foes? Whatever you want to call the relationship between the two programs, they’ve been constants — two quality teams orbiting each other, nearly always on a collision course for one of the season’s marquee games.

It has been that way since 1993, an annual Big Ten meeting between bordering states — two programs chasing the same things, eyeing the same goals. But now, it goes on pause.

Penn State and Ohio State won’t meet in 2026 or ‘27. The programs will have to wait until 2028, when the Buckeyes travel to State College for the next installment of the series.

What each program will look like by then is unknown. Penn State’s next head coach presumably will be in his third season, and Beaver Stadium’s renovations theoretically will be finished. The College Football Playoff might be larger, the Big Ten’s continued expansion a more familiar landscape.

A lot will have changed.

A history of exciting games

We can debate endlessly what to label the relationship between Ohio State and Penn State, but what isn’t up for debate is the quality and drama their games have provided. From a back-and-forth series in the 1990s to 2016’s blocked field goal to Ohio State’s 2017 comeback and the many moments since, you could always count on the series to deliver. The teams brought out the best of each other.

For Penn State, there is something bittersweet about the firing of James Franklin and the brief pause in the Ohio State series. Two related chapters closing in unison. Ohio State has always represented the existential hurdle between the program Penn State is and the program it wants to be.

On Saturday, the game will almost certainly be a shell of its former self, Ohio State firing on all cylinders and Penn State simply trying to find its footing again. Anything is possible in college football, but that doesn’t make everything likely.

Without the lopsided, sanction-impacted 2013 game, the average score has been Ohio State 31.2, Penn State 22.3, nearly a one-possession game each year since 2012. The smallest of margins, the smallest of differences. Overall since 1993: Ohio State 27.8, Penn State 19.8.

In some respects, it’s fitting that the last real meeting of the Franklin era was decided on a goal-line stand — Penn State losing, as it so often has, by the slimmest of margins. The Nittany Lions came up literally just short, inches between the hump and the downward slope.

Will that change in the future? We will have to wait years to find out. But amid Penn State’s failure, there was something romantic in the annual attempt. One program trying to establish something more than what it was, another trying to hold back the tides of change. It was the last decade of Penn State football in a nutshell. Almost.

Whatever you want to call it — a rivalry or simply a game — Ohio State has always been Penn State’s dance partner in its quest to become something more. And whatever colors Penn State has to dance with now, Scarlet and Gray and Blue and White will always be a welcome sight in the tapestry of each college football season.