couple of years ago, James
Franklin sent gasps rippling
through a crowd of normally un-
flappable reporters at Penn State's foot-
ball media day when he rose from
behind the dais at the front of the Beaver
Stadium media room, hiked up his
shorts and revealed an enormous red-
blue welt on his upper thigh. Franklin
explained that he had been injured in a
team-building exercise gone awry, a
paintball game with his players of the
sort that the coaching staff likes to
arrange every off-season. Eliminated
early, he was trying to quietly exit the
field of battle. He didn't get far.
"Most of those shots came when I
wasn't supposed to be getting hit, run-
ning across the field, the whole way
across the field," he said.
Franklin also got hit under his right
arm and on his neck, and he showed off
those wounds, too. He gave the distinct
impression that firearms weren't going
to figure quite so prominently in future
team outings. This one was "a great idea
on the front end," he said. "Not really
good in terms of the execution of it."
But as Penn State's belated 2020 sea-
son approaches, you get the feeling that
he would love to give paintball another
try. Or anything, really.
Due to the pandemic, Penn State has
had to do without all the off-season ac-
tivities it has typically used to help cre-
ate chemistry among players. That
might seem like a frivolous concern
given all the other ways in which the
Nittany Lions need to get their football
program quickly up and running, but to
Franklin, team-building matters a lot.
"That's probably the thing I'm most
concerned about," he said, "the chem-
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