Stock Watch: Offseason trends

Penn State dipped to 0-5 before righting the ship with a 4-game winning streak to finish the 2020 football season.

So what are we to make of the performances we saw through the course of the year?

BWI will spend some time in the coming weeks taking a trend-by-trend look at where the program stands as it heads into an offseason that will fight desperately to return some semblance of normalcy and regular development even as it continues to grapple with COVID-19 protocols.

With that, our first "stock watch" of the Nittany Lions' offseason:

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In a certain sense, this is the most overused concept in major college football.

We're going to talk about it here, anyway.

Yes, some programs are able to get old and use that multi-year experience across its position groups in all three phases of the game. In a modern environment in which, more than ever, players are arriving, contributing for a few years, then moving on either as transfers or to the next stages of their careers, it is more the exception than the rule.

So it would stand to reason that Penn State, heading into an offseason where Pat Freiermuth, Jayson Oweh, Shaka Toney, Antonio Shelton, Will Fries and Michal Menet - all starters - have announced they're moving on, the Nittany Lions will again have to rely on relatively untested pieces at critical positions next season.

That reasoning is wrong.

Granted, the impending decisions of Jahan Dotson and Jaquan Brisker, each of whom would appear to have a choice to pursue NFL careers or return for another season at Penn State, will dramatically change the complexion of the Nittany Lions' personnel on both sides of the ball, regardless of how their choices shake out. But, the reality of Penn State's abomination of a 2020 campaign is that the circumstances of attrition have already thrust the program's underclassmen into bigger roles than many of them could have anticipated coming into the year.

Most obviously, the absences of Journey Brown and Noah Cain at running back allowed Keyvone Lee to become the team's leading rusher during a year he likely would have been relegated to a few carries a game, tops. Instead, the sequence of events that saw Brown, Cain, and even Devyn Ford sidelines allowed Lee to ascend into 89 carries for 438 yards and four scores with a 4.9 yards per carry average.

No doubt, part of that performance for Lee acted in correlation with improvement that took place along the Lions' offensive line as it continued to acclimate itself to the new philosophical approach to the position brought by Phil Trautwein. That Juice Scruggs and Rasheed Walker finished the season as two of Penn State's top overall graded offensive contributors bodes well for the group's future up front even amidst the losses of Menet and Fries, who also finished at six and eight, respectively. Throw in Mike Miranda returning as the top-graded pass blocker in the group, and Caedan Wallace's extensively increased rep count thanks to the move of Fries to guard early in the season, and the Nittany Lions' have a solid foundation to build upon.

Certainly, questions exist at defensive end as the Nittany Lions continue to scour the recruiting landscape to build on a likely starting duo of Adisa Isaac and Temple transfer Arnold Ebiketie. The same is true at safety, regardless of what Brisker decides.

Yet, in evaluating the Lions' trajectory at nearly every position group experiencing losses this offseason, the program's unexpected absences of the 2020 season have left many projected contributors poised to build upon performances that occurred before they were anticipated.

Penn State won't.

Not to suggest that the program won't learn from its experiences this past season or work to correct its mistakes. Surely, that will be the case in a multitude of areas, not least of all with its failure to keep possession of the football or generate turnovers defensively, or with its situational failures in the red zone on both sides of the ball, or with its explosive play deficiencies at times through the course of the season.

But when Penn State's players and coaches return to campus for the start of the spring semester on Jan. 19, the focus will almost certainly not be that of a program that believes it had a full deck of cards that couldn't make the most of its opportunity to outplay opponents.

Rather, somewhat in conjunction with the previous point, the Nittany Lions are likely to frame the 2020 season as an unpleasant experience that included many of the lowest moments these players or coaches are going to experience in their careers. And having proven the ability to pick themselves up collectively from those disappointments and those failings, not only winning down the stretch but also genuinely improving in many of the "winning statistics" that head coach James Franklin has fashioned his program's success around, the view will be toward a 2021 season in which those trends can continue from the place they left off.

In other words, Penn State's finish was, and will continue to be, a critical jumping off point to head into the offseason. A severe disappointment at 4-5 no matter the circumstances for a group that has largely never experienced that type of futility, the demonstration of winning, then stringing it together, all when motivation easily could have waned completely, is the framework from which the program will likely proceed.

As noted here, Penn State is, at present, still expected to return as a program for the start of the spring semester on Jan. 19.

But as we understand it, the shape of the 2021 spring practice schedule - from winter workouts to spring practices themselves - has yet to be established firmly. At this point hardly a surprise given the conference's track record in the past nine months, the Big Ten has yet to offer ground rules for how programs are able to conduct spring practices, or maybe even if they'll conduct spring practices.

Add in the drum Franklin has been pounding all season, that the individual university guidelines and protocols, and the rules in place as governed by the states in which the universities reside will all dictate how a program is able to operate, and it's clear as of now that this is a scenario that is far from resolved even as the COVID-19 vaccine begins its rollout.

"They're all the things that we're working on right now. 'What is the plan moving forward with not only our current team, but also the incoming players?' What's going to factor to a lot of places is, are schools back in session? Are you in class? Are you on campus? Are you going to have spring ball? Are you going to have spring recruiting? How are we going to schedule the one indoor facility that we have on campus with 31 sports all playing pretty much at the same time?" Franklin said in December. "There's a lot of things that have to be organized, that have to be scheduled, that have to be communicated. And it's not taking what we did in 2019 or '18 or '17 or '16, it's literally... learning from how we handled this past year, because as we all know, it's not just like we're going to snap our fingers and this is gonna change overnight. There's not going to be that type of miracle or magic wand. So we have to plan for it, but the challenge is planning when you don't really know what this semester is actually going to look like on all these campuses, and how the NCAA is going to handle it, and how the Big Ten is going to handle it, so you're going to have to have multiple models built up."

Still, as director of player personnel Andy Frank indicated last month during the program's early signing day, the players who are brought onto campus as mid-year enrollees, as well as everyone else in the program returning to campus, can and will still have the opportunity to make critical developments in the weight room that were not necessarily available given the program's abrupt disbanding last March.

"Whether we have spring ball or not, we're obviously hoping that we do, they're going to gain the experience in the weight room," Frank said. "It's a chance to get on campus and get trained like they've never been trained before. And regardless of how classes have been, it's going to be a different experience. COVID has been a different experience for everybody. If you were a high school senior this year, you had a different senior year of football or classes than any other senior that we can recall in history.

"And it'll be the same thing for mid-years. They may come in here and they may be doing a bunch of online classes, and those will be challenges for them, but it's always a challenge when you arrive on campus. So they'll make that their normal, and they'll figure out how to work through it, and we're gonna help develop them as players and as people along the way. We feel real confident in our development staff here. Coach Galt and his crew do a great job with these guys both from a weight lifting standpoint, but also a running standpoint, that they'll be in better condition than they've ever been in their life and they'll be closer to being able to play for us. It's still a challenge, even for mid-year enrollees to play his true freshman, but these guys will have definitely a leg up on the rest of the class in terms of being able to play early."

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