Sunday Column: In Turning to Past – and the recruits that got away – Penn State Hopes to Bolster its Future

Imagine if the rest of life worked the way the transfer portal has now given coaches and schools a second chance to land the big recruit fish they missed out on the first time around.

You ask your dream girl to prom, only to watch her go with your high school nemesis instead … and then she spends a week at the beach with you after graduation.

You don’t get the job after nailing all of the interviews, wind up taking a position you’re just OK with at another company … and then the first company calls back six months later and offers you the position you interviewed for but with better benefits.

You get out-bid for the house you (but mostly your wife) really, really wanted … and then the new buyer backs out at the last minute and the seller calls you instead of putting the house back on the market.

Second chances come around every so often in life, but very rarely do they come back around in the exact same form. At least, until the portal turned college football into a non-stop recruiting carousel for nearly every player on nearly every team.

After Penn State formally landed former Ohio State wideout Julian Fleming this week (he had been on the hook for quite some time), it received a commitment from former Wisconsin offensive lineman and Nittany Lion legacy Nolan Rucci on Saturday. Besides being two talented players with Big Ten experience at positions of need for the Nittany Lions, they also shared the distinction of having been major Penn State targets and the top ranked overall player in Pennsylvania in their respective recruiting classes of 2020 and 2021 (it’s worth noting here that the top-ranked players from the 2022, 2023 and 2024 Pennsylvania classes — Nick Singleton, J’ven Williams and Quinton Martin, respectively — all committed to Penn State the first time around).

This is what the portal offers: A chance — sometimes, multiple chances — to get the ones that got away, to take the existing relationships you had begun to build during the high school recruitment stages and leverage them along with possible playing time, a fresh start, and whatever other opportunitie$ that college football player$ are looking for the$e day$.

Now, you can’t limit your portal recruitment to players you’ve previously recruited, and Penn State hasn’t done that, but going after the familiar faces is rarely a bad idea because A) There were reasons that you wanted those players on your team in the first place, and even if the players don’t pan out exactly as they or you would have hoped for at their first college stop, many of those reasons still exist and B) You’ve already put in a lot of work. They know you and you know them and their families.

Of course, like anything else, these things come with their own set of challenges. First is that there were reasons these players portaled, whether it was getting stuck behind a more talented player at their position, injury concerns, or that they weren’t a great fit for their coach or their scheme or both. You must also consider how the additions of transfers will affect the rest of the team, both in terms of their personalities/work ethic and the impact their arrival might have on the attitudes and work ethics of returning players who might be getting replaced. Yes, building healthy competition is good, but adding a player who doesn’t improve the overall team chemistry isn’t great even if he is producing on the field, and there’s only so much vetting you can do along these lines in the time frame you have to recruit portal players.

The other aspect of this is the way college players develop from the time they arrive at their first training camp, no matter which school that is, to the time they graduate or leave for the pros. Sometimes the five-star guys wind up as just OK players; sometimes the three-star kids become first-day picks. There’s no way of knowing which is which until the games start, and it is nearly impossible to make a complete judgment until the player’s career is complete, but so far it has seemed as though there are more of the former in the transfer portal most years than the latter, and this phenomenon is not unique to Penn State.

Does that mean that those blue-chip players still can’t be developed or be solid or even excellent contributors as-is? Not at all. But transfer portal recruiting is probably more about filling holes and stacking depth than it is about recruiting upside, which is why James Franklin and his counterparts around the country are still recruiting the nation’s best high school prospects with the same sort of devotion and fervor and trying to build the bulk of their roster on those high school classes.

Even if they now know that, even if those players sign with another program this year, they might very well wind up in their building after a couple of years anyway.