Sunday Column: Penn State Gets Back On Track By Being Ready And Willing To Change Course

James Franklin likes to talk about the four core values of his program, mantras that don’t seem to go too far below surface level but are easy to remember, widely applicable and, most importantly, well-suited to the cutthroat world of college football: Positive Attitude, Work Ethic, Compete, and Sacrifice.

After a bounce-back season that he and his program desperately needed, Penn State’s head football coach should consider adding a fifth core value, one that would slot nicely among the other four and just might be more responsible for the Nittany Lions’ current and future successes as any of the others: Adaptability.

Penn State just put the finishing touches on its fourth 11-win season in the past seven years, which is impressive and makes the 11 wins the Nittany Lions put on the board during the 2020 and 2021 seasons COMBINED that much harder to comprehend. You can squint a little bit and those two seasons, in retrospect, don’t seem THAT bad—Penn State won its last four games in 2020 and seemed headed for a strong season in 2021 before Sean Clifford’s injury at Iowa, which had ripple effects for the remainder of the year—but the gap between the talent on the roster and the results on the scoreboard was significant, and Franklin and everyone else in the program knew it.

The Nittany Lions had a lot riding on 2022. You can explain away a lost season and even two, but three is a trend. Yet they delivered, winning the games they were supposed to win and making one of the other two quite competitive (at least until the last few minutes). And yes, positive attitudes and hard work and competition and sacrifice all played a part, to be sure, but let’s look at the biggest reason for Penn State’s success in 2022 and how it came to be — adaptability.

Penn State was both more explosive and more consistent on offense than it had been in either of the previous two seasons, but the defense carried this team, and that defense had lost its long-time leader only 10 months before the season started. Brent Pry wasn’t just one of the best defensive coordinators in the nation, he was Franklin’s most trusted assistant coach. That Franklin was able to replace Pry with someone of at least equal quality in Manny Diaz and that the defense, despite losing six starters, five of whom were drafted, didn’t miss a step was a credit not only to Diaz and his players, but to the, ahem, adaptability of the other defensive coaches and Franklin himself. The only other assistant he might have trusted more than Pry was strength coach Dwight Galt—who also had to be replaced after the 2021 season. But the Nittany Lions didn’t seem to miss a beat or a bench-press rep with Chuck Losey in command, either.

The Nittany Lions’ long-suffering running game finally got into gear thanks to the immense talents of Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen. However, it wasn’t as simple as just pointing them toward the huddle. Franklin and Ja’Juan Seider had to balance developing those players with giving just due to solid returning vets Keyvone Lee and Devyn Ford. The backs needed blocking from an offensive line that might have been the most scrutinized unit on the team and dealt with key injuries all season, including one to its best player. But the Nittany Lions adapted, using various lineup combinations and some clever schemes—hello, T formation—and damn near wound up with TWO 1,000-yard backs.

Every college football program has been forced to adapt to the transfer portal, and Penn State has been no exception. Without Chop Robinson, Mitchell Tinsley, Barney Amor, and Hunter Nourzad, the Nittany Lions’ lineup probably would have looked a lot different and performed much differently this fall. Getting those players into the program requires one skill set, but folding them easily into the existing lineup requires another, and Franklin and his staff and players were up to the task in both areas, just as they had been with Arnold Ebiketie, Derrick Tangelo and John Dixon the year before.

And then there’s the quarterback two-step, which might represent the most significant (if not super-impactful) adjustment Franklin made in 2022. He had Clifford, as experienced a quarterback as any college team has EVER had, and he had Drew Allar, a true freshman whose talent and promise hits your eyeballs nearly as quickly as one of his spirals zips into a receiver’s hands. While he didn’t play the latter nearly often enough to satisfy the hordes of fans who had seen their fill of Clifford, he did get the rookie more game reps than any backup of his to date, and also more than any other freshman backup QB among Power 5 teams. A cynic would call that hedging your bets, but asking any college coach to think beyond the game at hand is like asking your dog to look beyond the food on your dinner plate to the snack you’ve promised to give him later. The point is, Franklin inched himself out of his comfort zone, and Allar and the 2023 Lions should be the better for it.

Then there is the adapting that has already started taking place. Franklin has been trying to drag Penn State into the NIL world for a few years now, and though he has an athletic director who has taken on some of that burden in Patrick Kraft, the Nittany Lions have some work to do compared to many of their rivals. The NIL surge has dulled the importance of the facilities arms race but only slightly, and Penn State is arguably even further behind in that vein, even with capital improvements already in the works.

But adaptability is not about coaching and recruiting and developing players on a completely level playing field, and Franklin has gotten good results without enjoying the same benefits as many of his peers. It is that quality that is perhaps his greatest asset, and it’s rubbed off on the grown men and young men he surrounds himself with to the point that even if they don’t call it a core value, it’s been at the core of this program’s sudden and immediate course correction.