Theoretical:
What if Ohio State is unable to open their campus by the start of football season, but Penn State can? Should the Nittany Lions start the season with the Michigan teams and everybody else, while the Buckeyes chill out instead?
Head ball coach James Franklin touched on the idea during a Wednesday Zoom call, via ESPN:
Big money right here:
BREAKING: Penn State has released the terms of James Franklin’s contract extension. The deal runs through the 2025 season, and will pay him $35.4 million in guaranteed money.
— The Daily Collegian (@DailyCollegian) February 26, 2020
Average value of $5.9 million before bonuses. There’s a $5 million buyout after next season, which then decreases to $1 million.
Franklin is 56–23 since coming to PSU, a fantastic recruiter and motivator who leaves something to be desired on game days.
As an aside, college football coaches continue to rake in the money while players earn absolutely nothing.
The NFL combine is here, and you know that means.
Time to read stories like “Player X is visiting with Team Y, here’s my shitty mock draft version 27.”
Over the next six weeks you’re going to read all about why the Eagles should target this guy, or that guy, how big his hands are, and how fast he ran the 40-yard dash, as if that stuff really matters as much as everybody thinks it does.
The good thing is that the Eagles’ needs are pretty clearly defined. This is said to be a historically good wide receiver class, and golly, the Birds could use some of those!
One of the guys graded to go in the second or third round is Penn State’s KJ Hamler, who spoke today and said this:
Normal service has been restored in Happy Valley.
Penn State’s football team finished an 11-2 campaign with a convincing Cotton Bowl win and a final ranking of #9 in the country in both the Associated Press Top 25 and the Coaches Poll. Remarkably, the men’s basketball team is in position to finish pretty close to that ranking:
Three mid-majors in the top-5 of the latest AP men's poll 👀
1. Baylor
2. Gonzaga
3. Kansas
4. San Diego State
5. Dayton
6. Duke
7. Maryland
8. Florida State
9. Penn State
10. Kentucky— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) February 17, 2020
That ranking will take a hit after the Nittany Lions’ home loss to Illinois on Tuesday, and followup loss to Indiana on the weekend, but it’s still heady territory for a basketball program that has perpetually lived in the shadow of Beaver Stadium and the teams that play there.
And this past weekend marked the latest in the long and great tradition of THON, Penn State’s famous dance marathon which raises significant amounts of money to fund research in the fight against childhood cancer. In an increasingly polarized culture, it’s nearly impossible to find anyone who can say anything derogatory about THON, and it won’t happen here.
With all of this positive momentum, it probably made sense for Penn State to make this announcement on a Friday afternoon, the traditional time to break news you’d be just as happy for people not to see:
A federal lawsuit filed by former Penn State football player Isaiah Humphries claims that coaches turned a blind eye to a culture of hazing in the program.
Humphries names Penn State University, head coach James Franklin, and one ex-teammate as a defendant while accusing three others of orchestrating the abuse. Staffers, he contends, retaliated when he complained about the abuse, which ultimately led to his transfer.
Penn State is 8-0 and rolling right along.
Of course they’ve still got Ohio State and Minnesota on the schedule, but with the playoff committee releasing their first rankings this week, the Nits find themselves at #4 on the list, beating out defending national champion Clemson.
And the committee got it right, in my mind. PSU has been the more impressive team with the more impressive schedule, compiling wins against Michigan and at Iowa en route to their flawless start. They will have to beat a ranked Golden Gophers team and the #1 ranked Buckeyes to reach the Big 10 title game, where they will then have to beat Minny or Iowa again, or perhaps Wisconsin. Those three teams have yet to play each other.
Clemson, on the other hand, is really being dragged down by the ACC. Florida State stinks. Louisville and Miami and Pitt stink. The Tigers’ best win is in the out of conference schedule, a week two, 14-point win against Jimbo Fisher’s Texas A&M squad. Right now the ACC only has one other ranked team besides Clemson, which is #19 Wake Forest. Their inevitable trip to the conference title game will result in an easier opponent than whomever comes out of Big 10 West, since the ACC Coastal is a big fat joke right now.
This morning we wrote about the ‘older’ Penn State alumnus who penned Jonathan Sutherland, ridiculously criticizing his “awful hair” while harkening back to the days of clean cut football players who didn’t have tattoos or perform “immature” celebratory routines.
This afternoon, Penn State head ball coach James Franklin opened his press conference by defending Sutherland and reiterating the principles that define his program and the PSU community as a whole:
Talk about a viral story.
A Penn State football player took to Twitter on Monday to post a letter received by one of his teammates, a meandering bit of nonsense about hair length, dress code, and modern day celebratory trends.
This was the image shared on Twitter by Antonio Shelton (@_groovy55) –
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