Recruiting is not fantasy football, where a coach can look at his roster, see which areas are lacking, and acquire new players who will be immediate upgrades at those specific positions. They have to recruit the best players in the class regardless of position, and while that doesn’t mean signing 12 scholarship linemen and six running backs in the same class, for example, rather than a group spread more evenly over several positions, it doesn’t mean they’re going to fill the positions of need in every cycle, either.
Sometimes, though, the best players wind up being the players a program needs the most, and a glance at the top of Penn State’s Class of 2023 hints that the Nittany Lions could very well have gotten much better at a few positions at which they’ve struggled for several years.
The two highest-ranked players in the class, both top 60 players nationally according to the On3 consensus rankings, are offensive linemen Jven Williams and Alex Birchmeier. Two of the next seven highest-ranked signees are linebackers Tony Rojas and Ta’Mere Robinson.
Neither position group has lived up to its respective expectations in recent years at Penn State. Linebacker U did have Micah Parsons terrorizing Big Ten backfields for a couple of seasons, but prior to Parsons being named to the all-conference first team in 2019, the last Penn State linebacker to make that list was Mike Hull in 2014. (Rising sophomore Abdul Carter might have something to say about that this autumn.)
