Sunday Column: After Big Offseason, Time for Lions to Take Advantage of Big Opportunity

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.

From 0-5 to four straight wins to retaining some of their best veteran talent to bringing in a dynamic new offensive coordinator to recruiting at a level only an in-his-prime Joe Paterno ever reached at Penn State, the last 10 months have been a furious ride up the mountain after a swift and deep plummet no one had seen coming.

Now all the Nittany Lions have to do is sustain this momentum is … win.

Look, highly-touted recruiting classes are nice, especially when they include as much talent at as many positions from areas all over the country as Penn State’s Class of 2022 currently does, and moreso when they are assembled by a staff that’s continued to turn over. But until those players are all signed, sealed and delivered and until they start contributing on Saturdays, those classes are just that – nice. And nice alone won’t put you in a playoff.

The last time Penn State had a class that had a pedigree like this was 2018. A 23-member group headlined by Micah Parsons, Justin Shorter and – for a few months, anyway – Justin Fields was the sixth-ranked group nationally and second in the Big Ten. Several key pieces of the current roster – PJ Mustipher, Jahan Dotson, Rasheed Walker, Jesse Luketa, Juice Scruggs, Nick Tarburton – were in that group, but a lot of their classmates transferred out or left early for the league.

If Penn State can get four or five years out of the majority of its two dozen 2022 commitments and the majority plays to potential, and the Classes of 2023 and 2024 follow suit, it’s not hard to envision the program finally going from good to great.

It’s also entirely unrealistic – which isn’t a knock on any of those players or the program but simply an acknowledgement of what college football has become.

It’s far more likely that a few of those players will never sign with the Nittany Lions, that a quarter or a third or even half of them will transfer at least once and be replaced by transfers from other programs. Recruiting the nation’s best high school prospects is still a huge part of college football, but coaching staffs that focus solely on that aspect of roster-building will fall behind quickly. Being able to manage and adjust to rapidly changing rosters and coaching staffs, as Franklin has had to do the last few years, is far more important.

So, while Penn State’s future is as bright as it has been in some time thanks to that bountiful July, it is important to remember that this future will change a dozen times between now and the time this class sits down to its first team meeting in Lasch and several dozen more by the time it plays its final game in Beaver Stadium. 

It’s easy to look at last month in the context of last fall and say that the team doesn’t need to win to recruit well. But if the mistakes that derailed the Nittany Lions in the early part of last fall aren’t corrected and 2020 looks like less of an aberration and more of a trend, it will become that much harder to bring this class across the finish line intact, to lure the big-ticket transfers to campus after the season, to build up the Class of 2023.

On the other hand, a win at Wisconsin and a primetime defeat of Auburn, some big-play cooking from Mike Yurcich’s new offense, and all that momentum Penn State built this spring and summer could truly start to snowball. And let’s be clear – if this program is going to catch and pass Ohio State and/or put itself into the national championship conversation, it is going to need a massive snowball.

Penn State’s coaches have put in the work this summer on the recruiting trail, not knowing if and when it will pay off. If the current team can put in the same kind of work this fall, the staff has a better chance of making months like the last one a regular occurrence and making those future puzzles easier to put together.