Column: For Penn State football, optimism ahead of season comes hard-earned
College football preseason media days are, without fail, an annual exercise in the art of optimism.
Saturday afternoon at Beaver Stadium, welcoming the media back for in-person interviews with players and coaches for the first time since March 2020, Penn State football’s event held to form.
Despite recent changes to on-campus COVID-19 protocols forcing the press conferences of head coach James Franklin and his coordinators to Zoom, the affair felt strikingly similar to past iterations.
Outside of a rope set up around the perimeter of the field, players and assistant coaches situated on its exterior with the media and program personnel penned into the middle to create some space, the interviews themselves were a welcomed return to the reliable, predictable tropes that accompany every preseason.
Like nearly every program across the college football landscape this summer, coaches were pleased with offseason development and players expressed the glut of confidence that comes with having a blank slate in the wins and losses columns. At a level of football in which change is the game’s only constant, though, the addendum to Penn State’s optimism for the future is the brutal disappointment inextricably tied to its immediate past.
In a season gone sideways, in a variety of ways, before it ever got off the ground, the 2020 version of the Nittany Lions created a scar tissue that isn’t so easily dismissed as cliche as the 2021 season quickly approaches.
And for Penn State head coach James Franklin, that’s a message worthy of leaning into rather than pushing away from.
“We all should have learned something from this,” Franklin said Saturday of the entire COVID-19 experience. “We all should have grown from this. I know Penn State has. I know Penn State football has.”
Absent the true freshmen in the program, who weren’t available for interviews Saturday, and the handful of transfers into the program this offseason, the sentiment was echoed throughout the Nittany Lions’ players and staff.
A preseason top 10 team last season, the nature of Penn State’s start to the 2020 campaign was its version of Murphy’s Law. If it could have gone wrong, it did, and Penn State bore the brunt of it as a program, seemingly held powerless against an avalanche of opt-outs, critical injuries, and on-field disaster.
By the time the Nittany Lions got their bearings, they weren’t only completely out of the conversation among the nation’s top programs, they were also assured of the program’s first losing season since 2004 with their 0-5 record. And though quarterback Sean Clifford and the collection of players, some forced into action by necessity, managed to reel off four wins in four tries to finish the year with a 4-5 mark, the impact on the program’s psyche has been deep and lasting.
Turning the page to a fresh start after an extended hiatus spanning December and January, the Nittany Lions’ return in February, their spring practices, and the offseason leading into this month’s camp have all taken place with two concurrent themes at play. Keeping an eye toward the possibilities of the future and the opportunity that 2021 brings with it, all of it is informed by the challenges that were endured a season ago.
"We’re hungry. We’re playing with a chip on our shoulder this year,” said upperclassman receiver Daniel George. “We just remember that start that we had last year, never letting that slip our mind and always using that as fuel for us.”
Himself sidelined early last season, lost to a foot injury that forced him out of action after only four offensive plays, redshirt sophomore Noah Cain held a spectator’s view to the team’s struggles.
Now returning at full health, though, the lesson he’s pulled this offseason has been one very much shared by the program as a whole. Having endured some form of embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, or discouragement by what took place, the effect has been one of improved perspective and, to a larger degree, a maturation from top to bottom.
“I’m so appreciative to be back out here,” Cain said. “My gratitude has come a long way, just really appreciating the game, appreciating the small things that I kind of overlooked before I got hurt.”
Welcoming the fresh start to the 2021 season, having worked to make right what went wrong a year ago, it’s a hard-earned perspective the Nittany Lions are counting on to pay dividends in the weeks and months ahead.
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