Sunday Column: Lions Have The Dollars – and sense – To Open Up The Wallet for Recruiting Budget, But How Much Will It Impact The Real Bottom Line?

The “alignment” between the Penn State football program and the athletic and university administrations James Franklin has so often talked about during the past couple of years, it would seem, is yielding some tangible results.

Reporting this week by Ben Jones at StateCollege.com showed that the Nittany Lions’ recruiting budget more than doubled over the past year, up to $2.8 million, a figure that would put a program that has perennially finished in the nation’s top 15 in recruiting rankings most years under Franklin among the five best in the nation in recruiting spending, which entails many things but was defined by the fiscal year report as costs of transportation, lodging and meals for recruits, costs of transportation for staff (including private aircraft), plus phone charges, postage, “and such.”

Franklin has had to fight for a lot to keep Penn State on relatively equal footing with its national peers since he joined the program 10 years ago. The facilities are outdated, though improvements are underway in a few areas there, including a planned $800 million upgrade of Beaver Stadium. The apartments where most of the players live are not of the same caliber as many schools have to offer. And, more recently, Penn State has been trying to make up a not-insignificant deficit in the NIL arms race. All of this stuff factors into wooing and signing the recruits who will earn the wins that will draw the fans who will pay for the tickets and write the NIL checks that keep the gears moving.

It is helpful that new-ish athletic director Pat Kraft is deciding not to cut corners on the recruiting budget, which is no small thing for an athletic department that is supporting 30 other varsity sports and still working its way out of the financial nightmare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising expenses across the board.

But although $2.8 million sounds like a lot, it’s still only a small piece of the larger recruiting pie.

Getting more recruits to campus or getting assistants out to more areas of the country is merely a prerequisite. How Franklin and his ever-rotating group of assistants sell their vision and their values to recruits — 16-year-old high school juniors and 21-year-old transfer portalers alike — plays a much larger role. Hosting a ton of high-level prospects for a White Out weekend is important, but showing them a team that plays an exciting, winning brand of football in that atmosphere is more important, particularly when Penn State is recruiting against the teams it is playing against in those matchups.

Penn State has a lot going for it as a program at the moment. The university’s academic reputation and sprawling alumni base are huge selling points to parents. The gameday environments are electric, even the sleepy September noon kicks against nonconference cupcakes. The Nittany Lions are sending players into the NFL at a pace that only a handful of programs can match.

On the other hand, each time Penn State comes up short against a highly ranked opponent, another brick is laid on the wall that says it is a very good program, but not an elite one. To think those losses don’t get brought up by other schools during the recruiting process is naïve, but so is thinking they don’t stick in the mind of some recruits without another coach having to mention them. Franklin has been able to land the sort of recruit that is capable of pulling Penn State out of this good-but-not-good-enough purgatory but to land enough of that caliber of recruit in every position group to actually do it, the Nittany Lions are going to have to start winning some of those big games. There isn’t any getting around it.

That is the greatest challenge the program faces right now — running into an invisible ceiling at full speed repeatedly. That the Nittany Lions are now, after so long, applying the resources to address the off-field challenges and beginning to keep pace with their national peers in all the ways it can make Penn State seem an attractive home to the nation’s best players is a great thing, and a great way to pass the time between the handful of Saturdays in a year when the biggest recruiting victories are won or lost. Those Saturdays will remain the gateway between where the program is now, though, and where it wants to be, no matter how much jet fuel is purchased for the team plane or how many five-star recruits make it to town for an official visit.