Sandy Barbour announced this week that she will retire this summer, leaving Penn State with a vacancy at the head of its athletic department at the same time its new president, Neela Bendapudi, is transitioning into the big chair.

Athletic directors – not unlike quarterbacks and head coaches – usually receive disproportionate amounts of blame and credit for failure or success, but it’s still a crucial hire for Bendapudi and the university’s board of trustees, one that could shape the future for one of the country’s largest athletic departments and its prominent and not-so-prominent teams.

Instead of getting into the list of potential candidates, today we’ll look at some of the tasks that will await Barbour’s successor, in rough order of importance.

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Editor’s Note: Every Monday Evening From Now Until the End of Spring Ball, FTB Unpacks All the Interesting/Unique/Quirky Play Calls We Saw During Mike Yurcich’s 1^st Season as the Nittany Lions’ OC

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With 11:25 remaining and Penn State clinging to a precarious 1-point lead over Auburn, life imitated Electronic Arts.

If the design of Brenton Strange’s slow-footed trot to the 2 – arguably the funkiest play in a Barnum & Bailey three-ring Whiteout that had failed fat-man fake punts, phantom Intentional Groundings, and a down that POOF vanished into thin air — looked familiar in the moment, well then there’s a good chance that you, like us, wasted too many days playing EA’s old NCAA Football video game franchise.

Indeed, “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game.”

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If you’re of the belief that Micah Shrewsberry’s first season as Penn State’s head basketball coach, which drew to a close with Friday’s loss to Purdue in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten Tournament, was an indication that the Nittany Lions have brighter hoops days ahead, there are plenty of signs you can point to.

You might want to give it just one more year, though.

Though it’s true that Penn State will, once again, not be participating in the NCAA Tournament, or even the NIT, it was still hard to be unimpressed by the body of work Shrewsberry and his new staff put together, particularly with a roster that was, by no fault of their own, rather hastily assembled less than one year ago.

With six returning players – only four of which saw more than two minutes per game last season – and five transfers, Penn State won 14 games, including nine against Big Ten opponents. There were some ugly nights, to be sure – the lopsided loss at UMass in November, the ugly late-season home defeat to Nebraska (that didn’t look QUITE as bad when the Cornhuskers then won at Ohio State and Wisconsin) – and a few games where Shrewsberry wishes he had one or two possessions back. And the offense, which produced 64.6 points per game (dead last in the conference) managed to have at least a few ugly moments most nights.

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Signing Day has come and gone. Spring practice is still two weeks away. In some ways, it’s the slow season for Penn State football, but in others, there is no time of year that isn’t important. Right now, coaches and players are compiling and checking things off various lists – lists of exercises to complete in the weight room for the players, lists of practices to schedule and of recruits to woo for the coaches.

Writers, of course, love lists. And while there’s still a long way to go before we have a true semblance of a two-deep, it’s never too early to type out a list of a few areas that could be scale-tippers for a team that was all-too-often on the razor’s edge between wins and losses in 2021.

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Penn State has few recruiting showcases as effective as an autumn White Out game. One of them takes place in Indianapolis this week.

Eight Nittany Lions will be among the 300-plus NFL prospects at the league’s annual combine, a sneak preview of another NFL Draft that promises to have strong Penn State representation. For all the baffling struggles the Lions have had on the field the last couple of seasons, they have continued to produce – and develop – a significant number of professionals.

This year, that combine list includes Jahan Dotson, the sticky-handed wide receiver who probably would have been a Day 2 pick in the 2021 draft but decided to return for another season to help his team (which was in need of more help than even he could provide) and to continue to develop his own game (which he did). He’ll likely go at the end of Round 1 this spring, even in what is another deep wide receiver group.

It includes Jaquan Brisker, the former Lackawanna College safety who came on strong at the end of 2020 then had a tremendous final season this fall, showing skills in coverage, physicality and instincts as a tackler, and versatility. Another transfer, defensive end Arnold Ebiketie, was a productive player at Temple but turned a lot of heads against stiffer Big Ten competition this fall and, like Brisker, was a key catalyst for a vastly improved Penn State defense. He likely earned himself a jump of numerous spots up the draft board this season. Jordan Stout, tasked with filling the shoes of a punter who is now starting in the league (Blake Gillikin), stands a very good chance of becoming the first Penn State punter selected in the draft since John Bruno in 1987.

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It would be easy to tell who the good coaches were if they all had a few games with the exact same roster. If the players were the same, play-calling and strategy would become more evident. You’d be able to see which coach players played the hardest for, how the coaches made the individual talents form the most effective team fit.

Since this is not possible, we must measure the quality of coaches not just by how successful their teams are but how successful they are in relation to the talent and chemistry – and availability – of the players on the floor. And most coaches, particularly in an era where the transfer portal is less an option and more a matter of course, are in the habit of adjusting on the fly. It’s not about who can draw up the best play but who can find the play that the five guys on hand are best equipped to make.

This is where Micah Shrewsberry is in Year 1 of his Penn State tenure. He is making the most of what he has, and in doing so is producing a brand of basketball that isn’t exactly elegant but has made his first Nittany Lion team perhaps more competitive than it ought to be.

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They can’t all be Saquon Barkley.

Nick Scott figured that out during his second season at Penn State, when he switched from running back to safety. Six years later, the seventh-round draft choice will start for the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl, the latest – but probably not the last – in a decent-sized line of Nittany Lions who took non-traditional journeys to productive NFL careers.

There might have been something in the water in that 2014 recruiting class, James Franklin’s first at Penn State. Sure, there were stars then who remain stars now – Chris Godwin, Mike Gesicki – but there were many more players in that class who had to take a leap of faith, a huge swallow of pride or a hard look at the path they thought they were on for their paths to continue.

Scott’s Rams teammate, linebacker Troy Reeder, seemed destined to add to the legacy of Linebacker U after a redshirt freshman season that put him on the Big Ten’s All-Freshman team. And then he transferred – and this was before transferring was cool – to … Delaware. A three-time All-CAA selection, he joined the Rams as an undrafted rookie free agent in 2019 and has started 30 games – including each of the team’s last five playoff appearances – over the last three seasons.

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