Penn State Sunday situation: Lions’ 5-0 start will only mean what they make of it moving forward
Evanston, Ill. — Penn State is 5-0 for the fifth time in the James Franklin era. The Nittany Lions blasted Northwestern 43-13 on Saturday at Ryan Field. Coordinator Mike Yurcich’s offense eclipsed the 30-point mark for the 13th straight game, which leads the nation. Second-year coordinator Manny Diaz’s defense held its fifth straight opponents to 15 points or less and gave up fewer than 100 rushing yards for the fourth time in 2023. What’s scary for future opponents is that Penn State is doing this despite not firing on all cylinders.
What Franklin, his staff, and players have accomplished so far is impressive. What comes next is what matters, though. Penn State was 5-0 in 2021 and 2022 before dropping game six. That won’t happen this time around, what with massive underdog Massachusetts coming to town on Oct. 14 following a bye week. But, it goes without saying that how the team improves during what Franklin called a bye not off week will go a long way in determining how far this team goes, or does not go, in 2023.
Changing up the bye week approach
Franklin has tweaked plenty of things during his 10-year tenure in State College. One of them is how his team approaches a bye week. It is massively important for the current and future state of the program, of course. Key players get needed rest and recovery time. Reserves and young players earn valuable developmental reps. And recruiting is mixed in, too.
“One of the things that we studied in great detail was bye weeks, and what is the best way to handle it so that you can find that balance between recovery and getting the guys fresh, but also getting better?” Franklin said. “This is a bye week. Not an off week. We got to get better this week, and that’s the fine line, right? What can we do during the week to allow the guys to recover?
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“The [bye] weekend will be huge, especially if it’s handled the right way. And then obviously being able to dig into our self scout, offense, defense and special teams, and then as I won’t talk about, but we’re also going to get ahead. The coaches will get ahead on the schedule as well during this by week. But, next week will be totally, obviously, on our next opponent. So those those are the things that we’re looking at pretty hard, pretty heavy. I think some of the positions that Pat [Kraft] has allowed us to hire has helped with that as well. We just got more people to do more things.”
He’s talking about analysts, of course. The group, which now totals 12, works on diagnosing Penn State’s flaws and finding those of future opponents, among many other things. They will be tasked, as will the rest of the coaching staff, with fixing problems from the first five weeks. The players are too, of course.
Penn State has something to build on
A college football team cannot go undefeated without being perfect before its bye week. But, if it wastes the time without a game, it’s likely to end up on the wrong side of a contest sooner rather than later. To a man, Penn State players who spoke after the Northwestern win said the Lions are looking forward to building on what they started rather than being satisfied with what they accomplished so far.
“We got a whole season left,” defensive lineman Adisa Isaac said. “I feel like it’s only the start. It’s only five games. So, we got we got bigger goals to get to. It’s just the start, it’s just a warm up. We just have to build off of it and keep going.
“We look at all the mistakes. Even though we won and it seemed like a good game in the second half, people made mistakes. There’s a lot of a missed assigments that need to be corrected. And there’s a lot of times where you make MAs and they don’t get caught. They kind of missed this look, or something like that. So, just cleaning up on the back end, and the little small details, is really going to help us be a more complete defense moving on tougher opponents later in the season.”
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Added Penn State receiver KeAndre Lambert-Smith:
“We can’t get complacent. We need to use this off week as a time to prepare for the next opponent and take care of our bodies, because we’re going into a stretch of the year where it’s going to be pretty tough. So, just taking care of our body and watching more film, building more chemistry, doing all the little things to getting that edge over an opponent.”
If all of that happens, Penn State will be better for it moving forward.
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