Penn State football closes spring practice April 26 with the annual Blue-White Game, which might be the least strenuous day of April for coach James Franklin and his staff. The Blue-White Game follows the 10-day window of the spring transfer portal, which runs from April 16-25, right in the heart of the Nittany Lions’ spring drills.

“Yeah, that’s fun,” Franklin said recently, his voice weary with sarcasm. Because of Penn State’s spring practice dates, the team could bring in, and potentially lose players to, the portal during the final week of drills. Which means a possibly confusing set of 15 practices, which already were going to be different because of the schedule.

Penn State adjusted winter workouts because its season went 16 games and didn’t end until Jan. 9 at the Orange Bowl. Franklin said that the strength staff would schedule fewer workouts to compensate for the late finish. But Penn State will hold a spring game unlike some other programs, notably Nebraska, whose coach Matt Rhule said he “doubts” the Cornhuskers will conduct a traditional spring game.

“We will still have the spring game, because I know what it means to this community and the hotels and the bars and the restaurants and the tailgating and all of it,” Franklin said. “We’re working on that now. We we may do some more events that we’re still working through.”

However, Penn State will modify the spring game, primarily regarding individual player needs. That means fewer reps for veterans and more for young players, as Penn State has done before.

“I think the biggest modification that we will make is very similar to what we did with Tyler Warren and

Olu [Fashanu],” Franklin said. “We’ll modify specific guys rather than modify the whole program, because, to me, that’s the hard part, and that’s the challenge. It’s kind of like teaching, you know,
you’re trying to teach a class and you got all this different ability within that class. You’ve got some

people in the class that really need to be challenged at a very high level and you’ve got some people

that just showed up that are entry level and you’re trying to reach all of them, which is challenging. I

think it’s the same way with us.

“If we modify spring ball, then all these guys that are fighting for jobs and need to be evaluated and need to be developed, they’re losing it and they need it. So for me, what I think we’ll do is we’ll modify specific players based on age, experience, reps that they had last year, reps that they’ve had over their career. Very similar to what we did late in the season in practice. You know, there’s some guys that still need a ton of reps and there’s some guys that still have to get better, but you limit them.”

Meanwhile, about the portal. Penn State certainly will be a player, though Franklin wants to be judicious, as usual. That means not getting “intoxicated” by the transfer portal.

“We want to be very strategic about who and what we bring in, because we’ve worked so hard to create a locker room that we feel really good about culturally, that we want to make sure we’re bringing the right guys in,” Franklin said. “Typically a lot of guys we recruit from the transfer portal or guys that we had preexisting relationships with, because we know how important the culture of the locker room is. So you know, I tell our guys, don’t get intoxicated by talent and talent alone.”

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