Penn State Basketball Crushes Shippensburg in Final Tune-Up Before 2025 Season

While most of the world was watching the NFL, and students were cleaning up after the THON 5K, Penn State Basketball destroyed Shippensburg 86-67 in the Nittany Lions‘ final tune-up before the 2025-2026 season starts next Monday vs Fairfield.

Despite initial nightmares harkening back to a 2007 game that shall not be mentioned, the Raiders were outclassed from opening tip.

Penn State Basketball, Mike Rhoades — Penn State Basketball head coach Mike Rhoades hopes to guide the Nittany Lions to take the next step in 2025. (Syndication: The Herald-Times)

Shippensburg was forced to call an early timeout down 10-0 and didn’t score until the 12:07 mark, cutting the Nittany Lion lead to 19-2.

Penn State led 48-19 at the half, and the rest of the game was academic from there.

Starting for the Penn State was star recruit Kayden Mingo (9 points and 7 assists but just 1 for 6 from deep), along side Tibor Mirtic, Ivan Juric, Eli Rice and Dominick Stewart.

Perhaps surprisingly again to see leading returning scorer Freddie Dilione V come off the bench again, as he did a week ago in Penn State’s 78-62 loss at Dayton.

Dilione finished with a team-high 21 points. Eli Rice started the Nittany Lion hot streak with 4 three’s in the opening ten minutes, a stanza that saw 9 different players see minutes.

Unfortunately, both Josh Reed and Sasa Ciana, expected to play large roles this season, did not suit up and were seen on the sidelines, each wearing a boot. Hard to take much away from a game where the dull ‘d-fense’ chants from the Shippensburg bench were louder than the sitting, seven-person student section, but one area of concern for the Nittany Lions is three-point shooting.

The Lions finished shooting just 11 for 32, a 34.4 percentage far worse if you take out Eli Rice’s 4-8 mark.

Penn State opens the season hosting Fairfield next Monday, November 3rd at 7:00 pm on the Big Ten Network. Follow along the entire season with the Shots Gotta Fall Podcast, the premiere, the best, the only Penn State Basketball.

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Evan Smith

Evan Smith is an alum of Penn State (Marketing, Economics, 2011) and a basketball season ticket holder since 2006.

NittanyCentral is his second reporting job following the Men's Basketball program. He co-founded and co-hosts the Shots Gotta Fall - The Penn State Basketball Podcast (the premiere, the best, the only) with Steve Travis.

Smith's most proud moment covering the team was seeing the national No. 9 ranking during Pat Chambers' last year. His most embarrassing moment was spending almost a thousand dollars to travel 2,000 miles in 46 hours to watch the Nittany Lions lose to Temple in the 2011 NCAA Tournament (screw you Juan Fernandez).