Tuesday, Penn State athletics announced in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Department of Health a return to capacity seating for Nittany Lion football games this fall.

Wednesday evening, meeting with fans again via this week’s virtual Coaches Caravan, Penn State Athletic Director Sandy Barbour offered more context and detail to what that means.

And for Penn State fans eagerly awaiting a return to the traditional fall rituals that mark football Saturdays in Happy Valley, the news was all positive.

“Our season ticket-holders in football will start to receive their renewals sometime next week, and we'll start to take all of those steps related to tickets and donations and parking and everything that goes along with a Penn State football game, and have those get going next week,” Barbour announced. “We believe that we're going to be in great shape from a tailgating standpoint, from a ticketing standpoint, pretty much returning to normal with a lot of things, including our great Nittany Lions on the field.”

Coming off a deeply amended format for Penn State’s 2020 football season, one in which fans were not only not permitted to attend a single game due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic but also were not permitted to tailgate in any of the parking lots outside Beaver Stadium, the news marks a welcomed return to normalcy.

Beginning with a Sept. 11 home opener against Ball State, the Nittany Lions will settle in for a month-long home stint including games against Auburn (Sept. 18), Villanova (Sept. 25), and Indiana (Oct. 2), before finally getting back on the road against Iowa on Oct. 9. Returning to Beaver Stadium Oct. 23 for a date with Illinois, in fact, the Nittany Lions will play five of six straight games at home.

They’ll then wrap the home schedule after two weeks on the road at Ohio State and Maryland with successive dates against Michigan (Nov. 13) and Rutgers (Nov. 20) before finishing the regular season at Michigan State (Nov. 27).

Though the news was made official via a June 1 social media and press release blitz of announcements, Barbour also revealed Wednesday that Penn State’s athletic department had very much already settled on its plan for a full capacity Beaver Stadium for weeks now.

“We needed to make sure that we were in sync with the governor, in sync with campus and what campus was going to do for the summer and the fall,” Barbour said. “But we were able to announce yesterday, with the governor taking all mitigations and lifting all of the capacity restrictions as of yesterday, we were able to finally announce what we had anticipated for about a month, that we were going to be able to go 100 percent capacity for all of our venues, including Beaver Stadium.”

Penn State's' season ticketing details are set to be sent on Tuesday, June 8.

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