Penn State radio show recap: James Franklin explains November practice plan, playing freshmen early to help late
Penn State coach James Franklin has held his final media appearance before Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. matchup with Maryland on FOX. The ninth-year leader of the Nittany Lions appeared for about 25 minutes on the Penn State Coaches Show Thursday night. And, he covered plenty of ground.
Read the highlights below.
How will practice change for Penn State in November?
Longtime followers of the Penn State program will remember reading or hearing about how the Lions shorten practices in November. It has nothing to do with the clocks falling back meaning more darkness earlier, of course. Rather, the idea is to help with bumps and bruises that are problems in State College and across the sport while also keeping everyone, healthy or not, fresh for game day.
“That’s kind of the hard part, right?” Franklin said. “There just comes a point of the season. Whether it’s just overuse, there’s obviously the physicality in football; we’ve had a decent amount of surgeries and things like that. So you’re just trying to adjust it. Then, you got some guys that are sixth-year players and fifth-year players who you’re starting, you’re trying to factor that in as well. Here’s somebody that we may be able to limit their reps in practice right now because they’ve played a ton of football at Penn State. So that factors into it as well.
“But then, you got to be careful because other positions need their development, and it’s hard to do it when you’re limiting other positions.”
It’s clearly a give-and-take. But, it’s one worth figuring out with three games plus a bowl game to go.
Playing freshmen early pays dividends late
Penn State has already burned nine redshirts for players in the Class of 2022. One player, Drew Shelton, is close to doing so. And three more are three games away from doing so.
Franklin was asked about how important it is to play guys early to figure out who is able to do the job later in the year.
“I think that’s also where the non-conference scheduling model is so important,” Franklin said. “Early on in the season, being able to play well and work through some of your early season issues almost like the NFL does with preseason games, lets a lot of guys get experience, evaluate your roster, see who needs to play, see who deserves to play, see who may not be ready. All those things early in the season are really important.
“And, if you think about it, that’s really kind of how it’s played out with these guys. Some of them played early and played well, and we just continued to go with it. Some of them, we shut down. Our left tackle Drew Shelton, is a perfect example of that. We got him the experience early on but then shut him down to save the games if there were some injuries, and that’s exactly how it’s played out. So we’ll see how that works out this week and the next couple of weeks. But I think that’s why it’s so important early on to get a good evaluation.”
Franklin has been adamant that his program’s 1-0 philosophy will not be sacrificed in the interest of saving a player’s redshirt. So, we’ll see how that plays out moving forward.
Making adjustments a focus for Penn State
Franklin was also asked to evaluate how his program starts games on offense and defense, specifically how it adjusts to what the opponent is doing after that first series for both sides of the ball. He’s pleased with one side and thinks work needs to be done on the other.
“Defensively, I think we’ve done a really good job of that and mixing things up,” Franklin said. “Offensively, we’ve really stressed it but haven’t had the results that we want in opening drives.
“But it’s something that we spent a lot of time about time on stressing in practice, and same thing on special teams. So there’s been some positives there but not not the total production that we want yet.”
To this point, Penn State is 74th in the county with an average of just 5.4 points per game in the first quarter, per TeamRankings. However, it is 20th nationally on defense after only allowing 3.6 points per game in the opening 15 minutes.
