August begins the slow turning of the page from preseason to season, replete with workouts and game plans and live-ball drills and media obligations. It’s the time to put in work without knowing if it’ll pay off in November or even early January.

It’s also a time for unbridled optimism; every team is undefeated, and the fears of coaches and cynical fans have yet to be realized. Everyone sees what could be and is reminded of how much they missed this brutal yet wonderful game.

As James Franklin and Penn State look to put a crazy year behind them, the optimism of August is ripe, even if it doesn’t compare to the optimism the Nittany Lions generated in July.

Last month, Penn State locked down a dozen commitments in a Class of 2022 that is now ranked the best in the nation by the major recruiting sites (and added in a top-40 commitment in the Class of 2023 to boot). That’s a hell of a month by any recruiting standard but almost impossible to believe when you consider that this team WENT 4-5 LAST FALL.

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Friday night football in Beaver Stadium is not exactly normal.

But it helped Penn State take another important step back toward normalcy.

The coronavirus pandemic has not yet gone away, and it might very well still be around when the Nittany Lions open the season this September. They were nonetheless able to get a full slate of practices in this spring, culminating in Friday’s session open to media members, recruits, senior students, and (thanks to a spur-of-the-moment PR move that was either insane or genius) a few fans who spotted the ads for free tickets the team put out on Thursday night.

The fans who first came and were first served lucked out with the weather, a gorgeous sunset capping off a cool-but-not-cold April evening, and were treated to, by all accounts … well, another spring practice. Some highlight-reel plays, some head-scratchers, watered-down schemes, etc. Getting to watch football practice at a big-time program on occasion, as any reporter will tell you, is a treat; watching it on a regular basis is tedium.

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First rule of the Blue-White Game: Don’t draw any firm conclusions.

This Kalen King dude, though, isn’t leaving us with much choice.

The buzz around Penn State’s impressive freshman cornerback, which has been growing throughout the spring, approached Apache helicopter levels on Saturday during the Nittany Lions’ annual spring scrimmage/exhibition for freshmen students and media afternoon practice. King turned in a pick six and another interception – of presumptive starter Sean Clifford – in the end zone and made his presence felt as a blitzer as well.

Although it’s tempting and likely prudent to say that any performance in any spring game isn’t worth the paper this blog column isn’t printed on, Saturday was just another sign that King could soon be a force to be reckoned with on a Penn State defense that hasn’t had a lot of those forces recently.

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Penn State will hold its final spring football practice in a week. Most years, it’s called the Blue-White Game, and it’s attended by as many as 70,000 fans, who probably aren’t dying to see how the third-string left tackle looks or who will be the next Aric Heffelfinger as much as they are just looking to scratch a football itch as they wait for September.

This year, the details are foggier, but we know that Penn State freshmen will be allowed inside the stadium to watch this practice or game or scrimmage or whatever it’s going to be. For the rest of us, it’s an opportune time to consider how the Nittany Lions might tweak the format in future, pandemic-free years of what is usually, after the initial excitement of seeing dudes in helmets and pads wears off, a fairly dull afternoon.

Some humble suggestions, with reasons why they would and wouldn’t work:

 The 7 on 7

Quarterbacks slangin’ the tater. Receivers and corners squaring off in a running chess match. This format, which typically substitutes flags for live tackling, grates on traditionalists but there’s no denying the fast-paced appeal to both casual and knowledgeable fans.

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The trouble with consistently recruiting and developing pro talent is that you’re consistently having to replace it.

In a few weeks, Penn State will almost assuredly continue a three-year streak of having at least one defensive end selected in the NFL Draft. Jayson Oweh, last seen making jaws drop at Pro Day, is a possible first-round pick and will almost assuredly go in one of the first two rounds, and if Shaka Toney is also taken, which seems quite likely, it will mark four edge rushers drafted from one program in three years, which puts Penn State on par with anyone in the country.

Though that’s great for Oweh, Toney, Yetur Gross-Matos and Shareef Miller, and also continues a strong tradition for the Nittany Lions at the position that started under the tutelage of Larry Johnson and continued through Sean Spencer and now John Scott Jr., it leaves the current Penn State team in a potential bind at one of the most important positions in the college game.

There are currently 12 players listed as defensive tackles on Penn State’s roster, including veterans P.J. Mustipher and Fred Hansard, promising redshirt freshman Hakeem Beamon and Duke transfer Derrick Tangelo. By contrast, there are only nine defensive ends, including two walk-ons and only one scholarship player, Nick Tarburton, who has been with the program for more than two seasons.

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Football, when you think about it, is all about math.

Quarterbacks are judged on their completion percentage (or QBR), running backs on their yards per carry, offensive and defensive linemen on the mass they possess and the mass they can move around. Coaches, of course, on their ability to make the hundreds of little equations add up to a win each week.

One of Penn State’s most underrated equations – the ability of Dwight Galt and his strength staff to add size and speed and skill to raw talent and turn it into future talent – was on display again this week during the team’s pro day.

Micah Parsons, a likely top 10 draft choice and the inarguable No. 1 linebacker in the Class of 2021, ran a 4.39-second 40 – one-tenth of a second off the best-ever time by a linebacker at the combine, Shaquem Griffin’s 4.38 in 2018 – at 246 pounds, or 21 heavier than Griffin. And it wasn’t even the top time of the afternoon. That one was a 4.36 40, which belonged to defensive END Jayson Oweh, who ran it at 257 pounds. That time was five hundredths of a second better than Montez Sweat, at 260 pounds, posted at the combine two years ago, which was the fastest ever.

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It’s been a rough year for hoops fans in Bloomington. 

Indiana, which is currently without a head coach, is watching the NCAA Tournament from home for the fourth straight year (not counting the non-tournament 2020). Hoosier fans might have felt a bit of solace watching in-state rival Purdue get bounced out of the tournament by North Texas on Friday in overtime. 

Bet they weren’t nearly as happy about it as Penn State fans were, though.

The end of Purdue’s season officially marked the beginning of Micah Shrewsberry’s Penn State tenure, and he faces several short-term obstacles in what is arguably one of the nation’s toughest long-term challenges. Just about everyone in the Nittany Lions’ regular rotation hit the transfer portal last week, and though those departures most likely have a lot more to do with players’ feelings toward the administration rather than toward the new coach, it still leaves Shrewsberry with a ton of roster-building to do.

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The Big Ten is a tough basketball conference on a yearly basis, and just might be the toughest conference in the country this year. Five Big Ten teams are currently in the AP Top 25, with four of them in the top 10 and three in the top five. Joe Lunardi, who does this for a living, has nine of the league’s teams as 95% locks for the NCAA Tournament field.

Penn State, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, is not among those nine. Yes, the Nittany Lions should have and assuredly would have played in the tourney last year had one actually been played, but the last time they actually played in one, Talor Battle was a 22-year-old lead guard, not a 32-year-old assistant coach. The Nittany Lions have never, since joining the Big Ten in 1992, made the NCAA field in consecutive seasons, despite (or because of) playing in a conference that regularly sends at least seven teams to the tournament each year. 

As a long-suffering hoops program prepares to turn another page, it’s as good a time as any to ask: What should realistic and reasonable annual expectations be for Penn State men’s basketball?

Contending for conference championships?

Finishing in the top half of the league?

 Making the NCAA tournament in most years?

Making it every two or three years?

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Spring is arriving in State College, which usually means just a little bit more daylight when you leave work or class at 5 p.m. … and it’s still 35 degrees outside.

Fortunately for the Penn State football program, that also means spring practice is arriving again after an extra-long hiatus. The Nittany Lions will open their 15 allotted spring practices on March 15, and they can’t come soon enough for a group that, for both understandable and still-inexplicable reasons, came nowhere near its potential last fall. 

Yes, with apologies to Allen Iverson and Ted Lasso, we talkin’ bout practice, man. But there are several areas where the Nittany Lions should directly benefit from those workouts – whether they include a Blue-White Game or not – after they missed out on them last spring.

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It’s hard to argue that Penn State’s administration could have handled Patrick Chambers’ ouster much worse, and that we haven’t seen the last of its effects.

 The encouraging thing? In the grand scheme of things, it won’t matter much.

When athletic director Sandy Barbour chose to part ways with Chambers last October, it not only left Penn State’s players and remaining coaches scrambling to get ready for the season, without any real answers, but it also cast a pall over the Nittany Lions’ future, effectively putting the parking brake on recruiting. Jim Ferry and the remaining staff and the players deserve a lot of credit for a collective effort that won’t put Penn State in the NCAA Tournament but did earn the respect of fans and Big Ten peers.

Poorly timed as it may have been, though, Barbour’s decision also opened a door of opportunity for a program that can still count the highlights in its 29-year Big Ten history on one hand: The Nittany Lions now have the chance to hire a difference-making coach and, perhaps more importantly, the chance to pay him like one.

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