Sunday Column: When Will Results Match Recent Recruiting Rankings for Penn State?

In college football, as is the case with many things in life, the more work you put in, the better the result usually – but not always – turns out to be.

In this sport, though, you need to be patient to see those results.

Penn State is hosting an important recruiting weekend for its Class of 2023 … but it will likely be no earlier than 2025 until those prospects (if of course they wind up at Penn State) will play significant roles on the field. The flip side of that, of course, is that the players who will likely shoulder the heaviest part of the load for the Nittany Lions in 2022 will come from the classes of 2019 and 2020.

And that leads us to what has been a not-so-minor issue for the Nittany Lions during these last two seasons of football purgatory; Penn State is putting together solid-to-strong recruiting classes on the front end, but not getting enough out of those classes by the time the players leave.

Let’s take a quick look at the classes of 2017 and 2018, which should have been expected to do much of the heavy lifting during the 2020 and 2021 seasons. The 2017 group, ranked 15^th in the country by the 247Sports Composite, included 21 signees. Just six of those players – Lamont Wade, C.J. Thorpe, Sean Clifford, Ellis Brooks, Tariq Castro-Fields, and Mike Miranda — were starters in 2020. Only four of them – all of the previous six but Wade, who declared for last year’s draft, and Thorpe, who gave up football and wound up in Dubai – started in 2021.

Now, that class also included K.J. Hamler and Yetur Gross-Matos, who played significant roles on earlier Penn State squads before leaving school early to turn pro, and Journey Brown, who would have almost certainly played a major role in the last two seasons had a health issue not forced him to give up football. But the rest of the group was a mix of players who transferred, never quite developed or fell into both of those categories, and the aforementioned starters had what can kindly be described as up-and-down careers.

The class of 2018 was ranked sixth in the country, with 23 players, and wound up producing even more elite NFL talent. Micah Parsons, Odafe Oweh and Pat Freiermuth were all top-55 draft picks last spring, and Jahan Dotson seems a lock to go on Day 1 or Day 2 this April. Rasheed Walker, P.J. Mustipher, Juice Scruggs, Will Levis, and Jesse Luketa have also been key contributors. But there were also transfers (Levis, Ricky Slade, Justin Shorter, Judge Culpepper, Trent Gordon, and now Daniel George), another early retirement due to a medical condition (Jordan Miner), and a player who wound up suing the school for hazing (Isaiah Humphries).

Is this phenomenon simply a product of the Transfer Era? Would the results have been much or any different in a non-transfer portal universe? Maybe. And there is a valid argument that the transfer portal has provided Penn State with more help during the past two seasons than it would have received from many of the players in those two classes at the same positions.

Transfers and exits to the NFL have already taken big cuts out of Penn State’s Class of 2019; just 12 of the 23 players in that group are with the squad this winter. Five of the 27 signees in the Class of 2020 have already left. And for all the talk of the splashy Class of 2022 stars, who should have chances to crack the two-deep this fall, it is those two groups that will likely determine what kind of season Penn State will have in 2022.

Will Parker Washington, Curtis Jacobs, Adisa Isaac or Keyvone Lee step into starring roles? Will Olu Fashanu, Hakeem Beamon or D’Von Ellies become key starters? Will one or more of their classmates have a breakout season out of nowhere?

Either way, it’s important to remember the time gap between the recruiting work done for each class and the year in which that work actually pays off – or doesn’t. The work in between has changed in the last few years, placing less of an emphasis on having to develop those players and more on finding replacements after they’ve transferred. We’ll learn around 2025 or 2026 if the work Penn State’s coaches are doing on the recruiting trail today will be enough. We’ll learn this fall if the work they did 3-4 years ago, and the work those players have done since, will be enough to get the program trending upward again.