James Franklin has been recruiting at a high level this winter – not just with players (Penn State currently has the third-ranked Class of 2022 in the country according to the 247Sports Composite) but with his swift and surprising addition of offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Mike Yurcich.

The recruitment of the latter could play a big role in helping Franklin land an even more important piece of the Nittany Lions’ 2021 puzzle.

It isn’t hard to see why Franklin pounced when Texas parted ways with Yurcich’s former boss, Tom Herman. The 45-year-old Yurcich’s career resume reads a lot like that of Franklin’s; he was a Division II quarterback at California University of Pennsylvania (Franklin played quarterback at another PSAC school, East Stroudsburg) and, like his new boss, earned a degree in psychology. Franklin had coached for nine different college or professional teams before getting his first job as a head coach in 2011; Yurcich, who has never been a head coach, is now at his eighth stop after making his third move since New Year’s Day 2019.

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There is a simple path for Penn State to return to football glory after a weird, wild and abbreviated 2020 season the Nittany Lions and their fans can only hope was an aberration:

Get in the damn end zone. As many times as possible.

If you watched Penn State’s strange and maddening autumn odyssey, from the stunner in Bloomington to the beatdown of Illinois, you saw both dysfunction and gradual improvement from the Nittany Lions in all three phases. You might have heard James Franklin profess one or two or 40 times over the years the importance of “complementary football,” and, yes, a stout defense and at least average special teams play are crucial for any team to have a chance to win at this level.

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An occasional glance through recent NFL Drafts can serve as a cautionary tale to football-crazed high school prospects or even major-college players. Even those who wind up signing million-dollar contracts are likely to be out of the league in three years. Pro Bowlers can come from Round 1 or Round 5, and for every player who left school early, became an early-round pick and then faded into oblivion, there are a dozen other players who left school early and never had their names called at all.

 Those same glances, though, can also tell you a lot about college programs – which are producing the most talent, which are producing wins without a lot of talent or producing a lot of talent without a lot of wins. There is a lot more to sustained success than how many players a program sends to the NFL, but it sure doesn’t hurt, and it sure doesn’t hurt your recruiting, either.

Penn State has sent a more-than-respectable number of players to the NFL ranks during James Franklin’s seven-year tenure. In the last six drafts, 26 Nittany Lions have been selected, all but nine of those recruited by Franklin and his staff. That list includes two of the league’s best running backs (Saquon Barkley and Miles Sanders) and a Pro Bowl wide receiver (Chris Godwin). Perhaps more impressively, all but three of those 26 players are currently on an NFL roster.

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Alabama played Florida for the SEC championship on Saturday night. Earlier, Ohio State battled Northwestern for the Big Ten crown and Clemson faced Notre Dame for the ACC title.

Penn State also played Saturday, but the Nittany Lions’ “Champions Week” matchup against a severely undermanned Illinois team was ironic, to say the least.

In one sense, the afternoon was a reminder of what went wrong for the Nittany Lions in this whirlwind season – a team that had entered 2020 with a lot of stars and a lot of promise finishing its season against another five-loss team in a game that, unlike the other three mentioned above, had no playoff implications but had the (checks notes) Duke’s Mayo Bowl Twitter account humming.

In another sense, it was a great opportunity to assess just how far away Penn State might be from playing on this particular Saturday, in a meaningful way, a year from now.

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James Franklin calls them “splash plays,” the tide-turning, highlight-reel plays that typically eat up big chunks of yardage and lead directly to points. Coming into Saturday’s game against Michigan State, Franklin’s Nittany Lions had been left, for the purposes of this analogy, all too dry all too often this fall.

Many of Penn State’s offensive woes stemmed from not being able to convert red-zone chances, but the Nittany Lions weren’t exactly piling up the touchdowns from outside the 20, either; through the first seven games, they had scored 12 touchdowns in the red zone and nine from outside of it. 

It was a combination of factors – Sean Clifford’s accuracy issues and spotty pass protection made it tough to connect on routes downfield. Young running backs and defenses packing the box made it tough to spring long runs. And, more recently, the offense’s shift to a grind-it-out-and-control-the-clock-and-move-the-chains-with-quarterback-runs approach that, while taking the pressure off Clifford, reducing the chance for turnovers and arguably giving the team the best chance to win, did not seem to be the best approach for producing splash plays, either.

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Sometimes, the bottom line has to be enough.

On several occasions on Saturday in wind-swept Piscataway, Penn State looked like a team that finally had all four wheels on the ground, and on others looked like the team that kept veering into traffic during the first five weeks of the season. But when the fourth quarter read all zeroes, the Nittany Lions had another win, by the score of 23-7, and exactly how convincing you believe that was or precisely what it means for the bigger picture is up to you.

Because, really, that’s what it’s about at this point in a lost season, right? What you see on the field is not really about the present any longer but what the future means for Penn State. And while maybe the margin wasn’t what some observers wanted it to be or thought it should be, there were enough positive signs in this one that bode well for the future.

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Full disclosure: After (rightly, and easily) taking Penn State to task in each of the previous five columns for many things, most of them relating to simply bad, bad football, I came into Saturday planning to use this space to highlight some of the positives for the Nittany Lions as it pertained to both this week’s game and, more importantly, to the future. I had planned to start (and likely finish) with some of the team’s younger players.

The kids made that easy to do.

Yes, Penn State got some important plays from its few remaining veterans during its takedown of hated Michigan — some big third-down grabs from Jahan Dotson, a big fourth-down stop by Ellis Brooks (and, asinine rules be damned, an outstanding heads-up play to help deliver what should have been a game-ending sack and fumble recovery from Shaka Toney) and, all credit where it’s due, a steady, mistake-free game from Sean Clifford, who had been neither of those things since 2019.

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Welcome to rock bottom. 

Or at least whatever rock bottom means until next week.

Penn State did what no other Penn State team had ever done on Saturday, falling to 0-5 on the season with a lopsided loss to a solid but unspectacular Iowa side and leaving little evidence that the first of those two numbers is likely to change anytime soon.

This isn’t a downward spiral for the Nittany Lions; it is a free fall. It can take years of work to build a program to the point where it can compete for conference championships and call itself one of the nation’s 10 best. James Franklin did that. And it can take only a matter of weeks to see that foothold he and his staff and his players had worked so hard to earn to fall away.

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Penn State made a position switch on Saturday that might not have saved the game but might have salvaged the season.

Or maybe the season was already beyond salvaging, and the switch only solved one of many, many problems while possibly creating another.

It is increasingly difficult to draw any firm conclusions about this Penn State team, which lost in a different fashion for the fourth straight week, other than that it’s not very good. The Nittany Lions have been consistently sloppy, but also shown flashes. They’ve been more than competitive when it comes to total yards accrued vs. yards allowed (501-298 on Saturday), a metric that doesn’t mean anything without context but usually speaks to general competency, and yet they continue to be insanely bad in the red zone, where they now have eight touchdowns in 19 visits.

The insertion of Will Levis at quarterback for Sean Clifford provided more of those scoring chances, and 20 of the team’s 23 points, as well as a vastly needed spark that seemed to permeate not only the rest of the offense but the rest of the team; the defense allowed only eight first downs and six points after Levis took over early in the second quarter. There was the powerful running style the 220-pound bruiser had shown last season, yes, but there was also a confidence and decisiveness in the pocket we had not seen from his predecessor this fall.

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Parker Washington had just caught his second touchdown pass of the game and his third of his three-game career, and yet, as he stood waiting for the two-point conversion play to come in, had his hands on his hips. A teammate gave him a half-hearted congratulatory pat, and the promising freshman receiver just stared straight ahead, continuing to wait.

There were still 16 points that separated Penn State and Maryland and 11 seconds left in the game. Washington knew, as did his teammates, and the Terrapins, and anyone who subjected themselves to as incredulous and embarrassing a football game the Nittany Lions had played in roughly two decades, that the game had been over for quite some time.

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