3-2-1: They're back

1 - They're happy to be back

File this one under "duh," but it has to be said nonetheless.

Given the saga that Penn State football and the rest of the Big Ten has witnessed the past six weeks, that there's a buzz around the program should be no surprise.

From the announcement of a 10-game, conference-only slate on Aug. 6, to the cancellation of the season on Aug. 11, to Kevin Warren's open-letter saying the issue would not be revisited, to weeks and weeks of social media speculation, the eventual reversal last Wednesday marked a return to something approximating normalcy and, more important, provided a concrete plan moving forward.

None of this, of course, means that Penn State or anyone else in the Big Ten is out of the woods, so to speak. If anything, the vigilance that has helped carry the program through a limited number of COVID-19 infections to date must double down in the days and weeks ahead if the program is to make its way through all nine games on the schedule into mid-December.

But the multiple media appearances for James Franklin the past week have served as a signifier of the enthusiasm that now envelopes the program.

"We're excited about it," Franklin told reporters Thursday. "It's not going to be easy. It's going to be challenging. We're going to have to continue to make great choices, not only as a football program, but also away from the football program in our behaviors as coaches and as student-athletes. But we're up for the challenge and excited about the opportunity."

2 - They're ramping up

Pads at practice will run concurrent with the daily testing that the Big Ten settled upon as a necessary qualifier to football's return, but that won't take place until Sept. 30.

In the meantime, though, the program is working through the details of its plan to be ready for that Oct. 24 game at Indiana, and Franklin didn't hesitate to acknowledge that the route won't be typical.

"I think the biggest thing for all of us is we just can't look at anything like how we've done it in the past. This is all different," he said. "The schedule is going to be different. Camp, if you call it camp, is going to be very different... And from a practice perspective, from a meeting perspective, leading up to the season is just going to be very different. So I just think we just have to approach it that way and if you try to keep forcing it back into the normal model, that's not going to work.

"It's going to be being creative and thinking outside the box and working not only with the staff and the training staff and the medical professionals, but also our players and talking to them as well, to come up with what's best for Penn State football moving forward."

Noting that he's watched multiple games through the opening weeks of the football season, both college and pro, Franklin also added that part of Penn State's planning would be shaped around the early feedback provided from those games.

"A lot of the mistakes and a lot of the issues that we always see early in the season, I think are magnified right now," Franklin said. "When was the last time a Big Ten football player tackled anyone? Most of us, we had no spring practices. So there's also an aspect of that, that we got to get ramped back up to get some tackling in, because you can't go from last season to your first game and never tackle. So there's gonna be a time and a place for that as well."

3 - The schedule is set

It took until the weekend after Wednesday's announcement of the Big Ten's return in October, but there's no more guessing about what's ahead now that a schedule is set, too.

This is the Nittany Lions' 2020 slate, if you didn't happen to catch it on Saturday:

2020 Penn State Football Schedule

10/24 - @ Indiana

10/31 - Ohio State

11/7 - Maryland

11/14 - @ Nebraska

11/21 - Iowa

11/28 - @ Michigan

12/5 - @ Rutgers

12/12 - Michigan State

12/19 - Big Ten Championship Game or plus-one game vs. West Division opponent

The full BWI staff offered some of its initial impressions of the schedule Saturday shortly after its release, but the bottom line is that Penn State won't be among the chorus of complaints at how it shook out.

Among the overwhelming majority of programs in the conference that saw the first and last crossover opponents of the 10-game schedule axed, the Nittany Lions are left with a trip to Nebraska and a home showdown with Iowa in addition to the six opponents in the East Division. And the bottom line here is that, beginning with an immediate road test in Bloomington, the Nittany Lions will have every opportunity to prove their mettle in hosting the Buckeyes and Hawkeyes and having to travel to face Michigan in Ann Arbor after Thanksgiving.

With this small of a sample size, the path to CFP inclusion isn't particularly complicated. Win your games and you'll like where you stand at the end of the year.

1 - So you're saying there's a chance?

The interest in Micah Parsons' immediate future is certainly well defined inside the program and out, and for good reason.

The All-American was an outside preseason Heisman contender and has the capability to change every game he's in. That's sacks and interceptions and forced fumbles and tackles and any other number of possibilities.

So when James Franklin was asked whether or not Parsons could still return to the program, his comments simultaneously kept hope alive and tempered expectations.

"You always keep the door open," Franklin told reporters. "But um, yeah, I think there's obviously a big difference between somebody that opted out a week ago compared to somebody that opted out multiple weeks ago. It makes it more complicated. It was pretty fun hitting Micah up right after it happened and watching all the fans go and crazy. So we'll see.

"But I also know that Micah as well as others probably wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for the circumstances we're under. I don't think that anybody, the NCAA, the Big Ten, Penn State specifically can just kind of put this back into the same box that it's always been in, because nothing right now is like it's always bee. So we'll see. As you know, I'm a positive guy so I'm going to try to see if there's a way we can work it out and get him back here if it's in everybody's best interest, most importantly Micah's. But yeah, we're always looking."

The reality, of course, is that whether Parsons returns or not, the Nittany Lions continue to have a strong set of linebackers ahead of the 2020 season. With Jesse Luketa moved to the Will, Ellis Brooks at the Mike and a strong returning contributor in Brandon Smith at the Sam back for his sophomore season, plus depth with plenty of expectations, optimism remains high internally for the group.

2 - How's the offense coming?

On the other side of the ball, the story line of the offseason, on the field, revolved around Penn State's acclimation to the new offense of coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca.

Though much was made of the fact that Ciarrocca's philosophy aligned closely with Franklin's and, by extension, Ricky Rahne's, there remained plenty of work to do to get Sean Clifford and two other offensive groups with new assistant coaches, the receivers with Taylor Stubblefield and the offensive line with Phil Trautwein, all on the same page.

Thursday night, Ciarrocca checked in for a 20-minute segment on the Penn State Coaches Show and offered a progress report for that element of the offense despite the many issues of a missed spring practice and a preseason practice that stopped seemingly as soon as it started in August.

"What we've done is, again credit coach and his leadership here, is we've really stayed focused from the very beginning on controlling the controllables. Ao we've been able to take each segment that we've had with our guys and take advantage of what we can within what we were allowed to do within the constraints of what type of equipment we've been able to have on," Ciarrocca said. "The players have done a great job in grasping the system, I think. And, it's trying to master the details in it, and the coaches have done a great job with it. So I feel pretty good about where we've gotten to based on the constraints that we've had.

"Would we'd love to have had some full contact practices? Absolutely, but nobody else had it either. Nobody else had spring practice in the Big Ten that I know of either, so we're all working under the same type of constraints, but I've been really pleased with how we've been able to advance ourselves throughout those types of situations that we've had."

ONE PREDICTION: The Big Ten will look (gasp) prudent in a few weeks

Did the conference mess up the execution? Absolutely.

Did it royally botch the messaging? No doubt.

Were there a series of head-scratching failures of leadership? You bet.

But when the conference lines up on Oct. 24 and has a full slate of games, many of those errors will seem distant. Though complex in execution, the reality for the college football world is that COVID-19 positive test results are disrupting games, and the Big Ten's push toward maximizing safety is going to be what prevents that from happening.

That is because - and, admittedly, this is a risky prediction - the programs within the Big Ten now have the resources (rapid, daily testing), and the road map for how to avoid the problems those other conferences are now facing.

As Franklin said at the top, it's not going to be easy for anyone involved to avoid positive test results. But compared to the situation in the summer in which, at least at Penn State, testing results were woefully slow to return, all of the conference's programs have an opportunity to stay on top of the virus and, more important, prevent scenarios in which spread becomes a major hurdle.

Even with the 21-day mandatory timeout for positively tested participants, there is a significant difference between sidelining one player against sidelining the entire offensive line.

Here's guessing that Penn State, with protocols established thanks to the program's medical team and implemented with Franklin's vigilance, is able to avoid those worst-case scenarios.

*******

• Talk about this article inside The Lions Den

• Watch our videos and subscribe to our YouTube channel

• Learn more about our print and digital publication, Blue-White Illustrated

• Follow us on Twitter: @BWIonRivals, @NateBauerBWI, @RivalsSnyder, @DavidEckert98

• Like us on Facebook