Sunday Column: Spring Ball Presents Opportunity for Penn State to Right Some of its 2020 Wrongs

Spring is arriving in State College, which usually means just a little bit more daylight when you leave work or class at 5 p.m. … and it’s still 35 degrees outside.

Fortunately for the Penn State football program, that also means spring practice is arriving again after an extra-long hiatus. The Nittany Lions will open their 15 allotted spring practices on March 15, and they can’t come soon enough for a group that, for both understandable and still-inexplicable reasons, came nowhere near its potential last fall. 

Yes, with apologies to Allen Iverson and Ted Lasso, we talkin’ bout practice, man. But there are several areas where the Nittany Lions should directly benefit from those workouts – whether they include a Blue-White Game or not – after they missed out on them last spring.

New Offense

We saw glimpses, flashes, of what Kirk Ciarrocca’s offense could have been last season, mostly between the 20s and many before Pat Freiermuth and Noah Cain were lost to injuries. But by the time the offense actually started to consistently click, there were already five losses on the schedule. It’s not unfair to say that those injuries, and the loss of Journey Brown, were major anchors dragging behind the offensive ship all season, nor is it unfair to say that it still couldn’t have been more dynamic, more consistent, or both had Ciarrocca had a full spring to install his offense.

This year, Mike Yurcich will face the same challenging task of getting his players and fellow offensive assistant coaches on the same page, but he’ll have two major advantages Ciarrocca didn’t: he’ll have the bulk of the unit’s key players back, and he’ll have 15 chances to work with them live. To expect he’ll have the offense sparkling and mistake-free right out of the box in September is too optimistic, but the work they get done in March and April will mean that much less to worry about in August.

QB Competition

This one goes hand-in-hand with the new offense, to an extent. Yurcich will need to get at least one, if not more, of his quarterbacks up to top speed; his up-tempo attack literally depends on it.

Who will it, or they, be? Maybe Ta’Quan Roberson is ready to take a step forward. Maybe Christian Veilleux, who enrolled in January, is that rare freshman with the poise and the smarts to contribute immediately. Or maybe Sean Clifford simply seizes the reins as the no-doubt No. 1. Spring ball is about building confidence and good habits as much as it is about competition. Penn State’s quarterbacks need plenty of all three.

New Coaches

Yurcich, tight ends coach Ty Howle and safeties coach Anthony Poindexter are the newbies and will need some time to get acquainted with their respective personnel and vice-versa, but remember that this will also be the first spring on the field at Penn State for three other assistants – Taylor Stubblefield, Phil Trautwein, and John Scott. Beyond being able to offer hands-on instruction between reps and get more looks at younger players, these coaches will be able to get a better feel for one another and for the overall makeup and personality of the team. They didn’t have that in October and much of November, and it showed.

Poindexter, the co-defensive coordinator, will bring fresh eyes and a new perspective for Brent Pry, which could have a subtle or significant impact on the defense as a whole. And let’s not forget …

Tackling

Penn State’s tackling, with a few exceptions, was not good last season. The Nittany Lions did a decent job of getting multiple people to the ball and a not-decent job of getting the dude holding the ball on the ground. You can file this under the “understandable consequence of COVID” category, as they clearly missed the reps they would have had in a normal spring and summer, but it is imperative that they rebuild those habits this year, and there are enough playmakers on Penn State’s offense to give the defense a solid approximation of what it’ll see on autumn Saturdays.

Special Teams

Joe Lorig’s units were solid-to-strong across the board in his debut season in 2019, thanks largely to the powerful legs of Blake Gillikin and Jordan Stout, but frustratingly inconsistent last fall. The Nittany Lions led the Big Ten in punt return average (thank you, Jahan Dotson) and were fifth in kickoff return average, but ranked among the bottom five in the conference in field goals and punting. Steady springs from Jake Pinegar and Stout would be one less concern for the fall and could make for some interesting competition when walk-on specialists Mitchell Groh and Gabe Nwosu arrive this summer.

Refreshed Franklin 

Heading into his eighth season at Penn State, James Franklin is glad to have some normalcy restored – his family, which spent the better part of the past year in Florida as a COVID-19 precaution, is back in State College, though he’s still living separately from them to avoid exposure. That’s nonetheless huge for the head man’s psyche and can only have a positive trickle-down effect on the rest of the program. We should also not forget how much Franklin hates to lose, and although the stretch from Oct. 24 to Nov. 21 seemed like one long, blurry nightmare to most Penn State fans, Franklin remembers each of those losses all too well. Therefore, these 15 practices are paramount in the re-establishment of Franklin’s “Championship Standard” – an oft-uttered locker room buzzphrase that ultimately fell flat last year and is in danger of being completely tuned out with another subpar season. Franklin’s energy and passion this spring must set an immediate tone players pick up on and eventually make their own come September.