Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1026347
I think whenever you've got a corner like that who can make plays, whether it's in zone coverage or in man coverage, it breeds a lot of confidence in your defen- sive coordinator and your secondary coaches. When you have a kid like Ricky Slade who struggles, how do you balance get- ting the messages across that you need to get across about fumbling without killing his confidence as a young guy? I think it's what you just said. You have to be aware of that. There's got to be a clear understanding and standard that that's not acceptable because it's prevent- able. I thought our coaches and our players handled it really well in the locker room, and you know, he's going to have a great career here and he's got a very bright fu- ture. But you know, typically that's an issue with young backs – pass protection and holding onto the football because they are getting hit harder than they have ever gotten hit in their life and they are getting bigger, stronger guys trying to rip the ball out more than they ever had in their entire life. I think the other thing is, you know, they are just better than everybody in high school. Going against guys who are as good or almost as good as them and the margin of error is so small, all those things matter. He'll learn from this and grow from this and be better from this ex- perience because of how he's handled it and how our team handled it and I think how our coaches handled it. How fair of a barometer are the 2016 and 2017 seasons in terms of what you're expect- ing out of the offense? There's a perception, fair or not, that Ricky Rahne and Trace Mc- Sorley are still here, so every- thing is going to be the same. But maybe people are measuring this year's offense against the wrong thing. Are you expecting it to look like what it used to? Yeah, I think that's a good question. I would say No. 1, obviously, when you stay in-house, for a number of reasons, be- cause Ricky has earned the opportunity and also because your quarterback has had a lot of success in that system, you don't expect it to look different. So yes, we want it to look similar. But even from year one to year two, it changed. And then obviously, although we are staying in the same system, you've got a different personality now calling the plays with different backgrounds and things like that. So we are going to be constantly evolv- ing. It's no different than our program. Our core values and our core beliefs will not change, but you'll see aspects around that nucleus evolve and grow and adapt, and they have to. In this game, if you're not growing and you're not adapting and you're not evolving, you're not going to last very long. So each week, we're going to learn. Each year, we're going to learn. And then our personnel will also factor into it. When you have a guy like Mike Gesicki, there are S E P T E M B E R 1 2 , 2 0 1 8 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 11 Franklin was mostly pleased with the Nittany Lions' performance in their 51-6 victory at Pitt. "I think we took a step in the right direction," he said, "cleaned up some things, played aggressive, played fast." Photo by Steve Manuel