Penn State

“The Decision Doesn’t Need to be Made Right Now” Says James Franklin of Big 10’s Imperiled Football Season

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Aug 11th, 2020 · 10:18 AM EDT

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The Big 10 presidents will meet this morning to determine whether or not the conference will play football this season.

Numerous coaches came out Monday in support of playing a season, or at least pushing the start date back, and one of them was Penn State’s James Franklin, who explained his viewpoint in more detail on Get Up, a short time ago:

James Franklin was on Get Up a short time ago talking about the Big 10 season, or perhaps lack thereof: pic.twitter.com/cGGCrhlzrM

— Kevin Kinkead (@Kevin_Kinkead) August 11, 2020

Franklin went on to explain that there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding cancellation of the season.

What happens with:

• 5th year seniors?
• incoming freshman players?
• guys entering the transfer portal?
• etc

It’s a good point, because the ripple effect of not playing a season also needs to be taken into consideration, with wonky NCAA amateurism rules lording over kids who just want to play ball. Some of these guys have NFL prospects and want to make sure they remain on the right path.

Penn State is scheduled to begin play on September 5th against Northwestern, so that’s less than a month. But the Big 10 built two bye weeks into the season, which would allow them to flex back to a 9/19 start date if necessary, giving us about five weeks from today to shore-up health and safety protocols and save the campaign.

We’ll see. The presidents are supposed to meet in about 15 minutes.