Blue White Illustrated

ON LEADERSHIP We don't have a huge senior class, but I think the leadership's been really strong. You look at the leadership council, you look at the cap- tains, and those guys have been really good. The term I use all the time is culture- drivers. I think there's alignment be- tween the coaches and the players. We made some changes in the o9-season, nothing dramatic, but just some subtle changes. One of the mistakes that I made a year ago happened when the NCAA cut back the amount of prac- tices that we could have during camp. They cut out 8ve practices, I think that's what the number was, and that gave me some anxiety. So typically we schedule some surprise o9-days in there and things like that and I didn't do it, losing 8ve practices, and I think it a9ected morale and a lot of di9erent things. Little subtle things like that can go a long way, so we plan for those things. I just think there's been really good discussion in both directions. There's been really good leadership. I think we've got some older guys now who have kind of seen di9erent situations. They have been a part of great wins. They have been a part of tough losses. There's growth that comes from all of it, as long as you approach it and em- brace it the right way. I think probably a really good example was the other night a:er that [Michi- gan State] game, we had some things go on that I wasn't real pleased about, and you know, maybe when I was a younger coach, I would have went into the locker room and been a little bit emo- tional, but I sat back in the back room and kind of got my thoughts together to make sure we handled that the right way, and the coaching sta9 was a big part of that, too. Just things like that. I don't think people realize sometimes how fragile it all is, and how strategic you need to be with messages and every day you've got an opportunity to get better and you've got an opportunity to get worse. You know, we have been fortunate. There's been adversity that has hit, but I think the locker room has handled it well. I think the coaches have handled it well and we keep growing. I will say that's probably come with age and experience, as well. I try not to overreact to things as much. We are just in a good place. I think the coaches' relationships with the players are really strong, and vice versa. We're able to have tough conversations with guys. We're able to hold guys accountable, and they don't like it, but they under- stand it. We're in a good place. You've never arrived, because as I said to you guys before, you know, we're responsible for 120 18- to 22- year-old males and there's always something going on, and that's aca- demically, that's athletically, that's so- cially, that's all of it. We're just in a good place, but we can't ever take that for granted. We have to keep working for it every single day. ON THE PROGRAM'S GROWTH You talk about the record since [the Minnesota game in 2016]. I think if you look at that game and from that year moving forward, if you look at the coaches who have been doing it since then, there are very few who have won more games than we have as a program since that point. P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> C O A C H S P E A K E X C E R P T S F R O M J A M E S F R A N K L I N ' S R E C E N T P R E S S E R S did with Clifford running the offense, maybe they wouldn't. But we do know this: Penn State's out- look going forward is brighter with Clif- ford having gotten his on-the-job training out of the way as a redshirt sophomore rather than as a redshirt jun- ior in 2020. I hope that doesn't come off the wrong way. I'm not throwing shade at Stevens. He made a decision that felt right to him at the time, and as I've argued before in this space, players aren't just temp workers toiling away in higher ed's ver- sion of the gig economy. They're the reason that the game's very lucrative business model works. Stevens was given an opportunity that coaches have enjoyed from the very beginning, and he took advantage of it. That he came back to Penn State for homecoming during Mississippi State's bye week tells you a lot about his appreciation for his former teammates and his alma mater. But looking at the Nittany Lions' quar- terback situation purely in terms of the team's competitive potential going for- ward, you have to like where things are headed with Clifford on the verge of completing his first regular season as the starter. Through 10 games, he was enjoying one of the better seasons of any quar- terback in the Big Ten. Clifford was leading the conference in total offense at 282.4 yards per game, was second in passing at 245.0 yards per game and sixth in pass-efficiency with a rating of 154.0. True, there had been moments against Pitt, Iowa and even Purdue in which the offense struggled to generate first downs. There were those three in- terceptions at Minnesota that, com- bined with a series of red zone mishaps, torpedoed an otherwise productive per- formance by the offense. But consider- ing that the Nittany Lions had gone into the season with what Athlon rated as the Big Ten's 10th-best quarterback sit- uation, you couldn't help but be im- pressed with what Clifford accomplished over the first two months of the campaign. James Franklin said at the beginning of the season that he expected Clifford to need some time to adapt to his new real- ity as Penn State's starting quarterback.

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