Does Penn State’s Beaver Stadium have a heated field?

After being arguably the best college Football program that did not make the College Football Playoff in its original four-team format, the No. 6 Penn State Nittany Lions will welcome the No. 11 SMU Mustangs to Happy Valley in a win-or-go-home, first-round CFP game. This will be the biggest game in Beaver Stadium history, as every national title Penn State has ever won came somewhere else.

Simply put, the stakes have never been higher for the Nittany Lions at home to date. Whoever wins this game between Penn State and SMU will get to face the No. 3-seeded Boise State Broncos in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Eve. The weather will be much nicer outside in greater Phoenix, but that game shall be played indoors. As far as Saturday’s playoff game, it will be in frigid temperatures.

So what a lot of people are wondering is if the Beaver Stadium turf is heated. With it being a 12:00 p.m. ET kickoff on the shortest day of the year, it is not going to warm up at all. We are looking 26 degrees Fahrenheit at kickoff with it not getting any hotter as the game goes on. While there will be no precipitation, there will be a constant wind over around 15 miles per hour coming from the northwestern direction. Oof…

Unfortunately for the Nittany Lions and Mustangs, Beaver Stadium’s field of play is not heated … yet!

While heated fields or artificial playing surfaces that help melt snow have become more commonplace across the NFL, this is only college football. Prior to this season, the latest football game that could have been played at Beaver Stadium would have been during Thanksgiving weekend. It is untrodden territory for teams playing north of the Mason-Dixon Line. College is becoming more pro.

In all the years I have watched football, poor weather usually helps out the lesser team. This is because it lowers the more talented team’s ceiling more than it lowers the worse team’s floor. As the seeding and point spread indicates, the worse team in this game would be SMU. While the Mustangs could potentially pull off the upset, Penn State is more used to playing in awful weather.

If there is one thing working in SMU’s advantage, it is the speed in which they play on both sides of the ball. Should quarterback Kevin Jennings be able to run for his life and if the SMU pass-rush can get after Drew Allar, then the Ponies will have a chance. If not, then I think there is a strong possibility that Penn State could get out to an early lead and never relinquish it. I would not want to get tackled…

While it will be a fast track in Phoenix in 10 days, it will be like playing on frozen concrete on Saturday.