Wednesday's top Penn State football tweets and headlines are led by an upcoming James Franklin news conference and also one Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz held on Tuesday.
The eighth-year leader of the Nittany Lions will hold his lone bye week media availability on tonight, where he'll be asked to discuss injured players, among other things.
Meanwhile, in Iowa City, Ferentz doubled down on the idea that Nittany Lions players were faking injuries at times throughout the 23-20 loss at Kinnick Stadium. Franklin will be asked to address that, too.
Let's get into the newsstand for Oct. 13.
Tweets of the day
We'll start with Franklin, who will meet with reporters around 6:30 p.m. tonight. For those seeking an in-depth injury update, don't get your hopes up, as there is little doubt that he will only share specifics if a player is out for the year, and even then, he's unlikely to say what the issue is.
Moving on to Ferentz, he continues to take an approach that suggests Iowa fans were right to boo injured Penn State players because most were faking it, in his mind.
It's a confusing hill to take a stubborn stance on, as five guys didn't return to the game, and two of the others who did are arguably the Lions' best two players and thus have no incentive to sit out a few plays before coming back in.
Expect that this will be asked about this week and beyond, and who had a Penn State-Iowa feud as the most-talked-about one of the first half of the college football season?
Moving on to some NFL alumni news, Nick Bowers made his NFL debut in the Las Vegas Raiders loss over the weekend.
Finally, Jordan Stout has the NCAA's top 'boom rating' per the FAU Jaffe Kicker & Punter Indexes, which describes that as "a performance measure on a scale of 0.00 to 1.00. Multiple factors are included in the Boom Rating such as net yards per kick, line of scrimmage, and proximity to each end zone, etc. " Stout's rating is .734.
Headlines of the day
High School Player of the Week: DeMatha’s Kevin Winston Jr.: WTOP
Penn State Nittany Lions Football: Midseason Snap Counts: Snyder, BWI
Penn State’s inexperienced backup quarterback had tough sledding at Iowa: Juliano, Inquirer
Midseason transfer trade-off: How Will Levis, other PSU exits have fared: Eckert, BWI
How have James Franklin’s Penn State football teams fared coming out of the bye week? : Morganstein, Collegian
Ferentz doubles down on injury narrative, says Iowa fans 'smelled a rat': Bauer, BWI
The 10 stats that tell the story of Penn State’s 2021 season at the midway point: Meyer, Post-Gazette
Penn State football offense roundtable: Best and worst from the PSU offense: Bauer, Eckert, Pickel, BWI
Quote of the day
"Football's a hard competitive tough game and fans are into it just like everybody else is into it and, first of all, I know a couple players were legitimately hurt, I know that, I saw one sitting on the bench, for whatever reason, there was an opening and I saw him and I know he had an ice bag on his leg. Obviously the quarterback didn't come back. So I hope those guys are well, I don't know what their status is, nobody wants to see anybody get hurt. Nobody. But I think probably it's a reaction to there were a couple guys that were down for the count and then were back a play or two later and our fans aren't stupid, they're watching, they know what's going on. I've been here 23 years I think that's only the second time we have seen that kind of stuff going on.
"I know it's a topic nationally right now, it was one of the discussions of the rules, they don't quite, nobody knows the answer to it, but it's -- and I also know for a fact that people -- I'm not saying, I just, there are two people in our building that have been places where that was "scuba" or "dive" -- no "scuba" and "turtle" were the code words. So it goes on, we don't coach it, haven't really been exposed to it and our fans, I thought they smelled a rat, I guess, I don't know, so they responded the way they responded."
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