Blue-White 2025: Familiar But Changed Setting, Familiar But Changed Format, Familiar But Changed Sport

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Most of the eyes were focused on the new wide receivers, with a few more thoughts focused on the receiver that just committed and will arrive this summer. Most of the key starters were resting after nursing minor injuries during the spring. Most of the new defensive coordinator’s playbook, which the Nittany Lions have been feverishly trying to learn this spring, was not on display, just in case there were Michigan sentries hiding somewhere in the modest crowd of 15,000 54,000 people.

Welcome to Blue White, 2025 style, a day when Penn State clung to one of the longstanding traditions of its past while the influences of the rapidly arriving future tugged at it from all sides.

This game wasn’t televised, because no one else televised their spring game, if they had one at all. No stats were recorded, because it wasn’t really quite 11-on-11 football. There was stuff to learn, to be sure, if you factored in the gusting winds and the fact that the quarterbacks were operating behind makeshift lines and the scoring was confusing. This is not to say that this game mattered more or less than the Blue White Game from, say, 1995 or 1982 or 2013, but it did underscore some of the big changes that have been made or are in the process of being made at a place that was allergic to change for so many years.

James Franklin, in his postgame commentary, spent one breath bemoaning what the transfer portal has done to the nature of the game (and what the potentially pending NCAA roster limits could do) and the next breath offering a casting call to linebackers to join a school that once had future All-Americans riding the bench at the position. When he was hired in 2014, Franklin was a young, up-and-coming coach with a strong recruiting track record who represented a modern approach that many believed was sorely needed in a football kingdom that, even before disaster struck in 2011, had gone stale. Eleven years later, there is gray in his beard, he’s one of the elder statesmen of both the Big Ten and the larger college football universe, and the recruiting game he once knew and played so well has switched to an entirely new playing field.

The idealist in Franklin longs to continue the model of recruiting a high school player, allowing him to develop at a pace that suits both him and the program, then sending him to the NFL with diploma in hand. The pragmatist in him knows that even the schools who are able to most closely repeat that model will have to fill in the cracks — at wide receiver, at linebacker, anywhere — with transfers, some of whom will be changing schools for the second or third time. After years of fighting to help drag Penn State’s facilities and budget into the 21^st century, he recognizes that the changes to the sport have shrunk the number of programs who have a legit shot at winning it but leveled the playing field somewhat among those chosen few, which, yes, does include Penn State. Those changes mean that a roster might have more holes in it come the end of bowl season than it would have a few years ago but that most of those holes can now be filled by the time preseason camp starts.

Still, it’s an odd place to be for any coach. There are players on the roster making seven figures from NIL deals and yet there are others who might be cut if the NCAA and House settlement goes a certain way. A stadium that for years brought in enough revenue to fund football and several other sports using only seven or eight Saturdays a year is now in flux itself, with a hefty price tag that only figures to grow with rising construction costs. There are 13 starters back from a team that went to the national semifinal and there might be a couple of starters who are not even on campus yet.

The five Nittany Lions who were drafted this weekend — Abdul Carter, Tyler Warren, KJ Winston, Jaylen Reed and Kobe King — were all original Penn State recruits, and Franklin and his staff undoubtedly took no small amount of pride in the way they developed. But six of the 19 Nittany Lions selected in the three drafts before that were transfers, and it’s likely that split will continue to shift at Penn State and all other programs moving forward. That’s the nature of the sport now, regardless of how Franklin or other coaches feel about it. The nature of the change might be transformational rather than transactional, but the change itself — in the rosters, in the coaching box, in the stands, and certainly in the players’ bank accounts — is here to stay.