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8er Penn State's 53-39 win over Memphis in the 2019 Cotton Bowl, a victory that completed the team's third 11-win season in four years, many college football fans across the country seemed to believe that 2020 would be the year the Nittany Lions took the next step back to elite status, qualifying for the College Football Playo7 and making a run at winning the program's third na- tional championship. When the preview magazines began hitting newsstands in May, they all ranked Penn State among the top eight teams in the country. Those rankings were a re6ection of the personnel that James Franklin and his sta7 had assem- bled. In Micah Parsons, Penn State boasted possibly the leading contender to win the Bednarik and Butkus awards, which go to the nation's most outstanding de- fensive player and top linebacker, re- spectively. Many NFL Dra8 forecasts had him going in the top 5ve picks next April following what was expected to be a stellar junior season. Also, Pat Freiermuth was considered one of the top two candidates for the Mackey Award, which is given annually to the nation's best tight end. And many college football writers, myself included, considered Journey Brown to be one of the top 5ve running backs in the coun- try. I believed that Brown's partnership with promising sophomore Noah Cain would give Penn State the best RB tan- dem in the Big Ten. Throw in four returning starters on the o7ensive line, four linebackers who had received 5ve-star ratings from at least one of the major recruiting web- sites, and a potential breakout star in defensive end Jayson Oweh, and it's easy to understand why the consensus of the college football analysts was that Penn State would be Ohio State's toughest challenger for the Big Ten's East Division title and a spot in the league title game and the playo7. The one critical position where Penn State didn't have what most writers considered to be a 5rst-team All-Con- ference-type of athlete was the quarter- back spot. Sean Cli7ord was labeled by Lindy's Sports preseason Big Ten 2020 Preview magazine as a third-team All- Big Ten selection. Ohio State's Justin Fields was viewed going into the season as the Big Ten's premier quarterback. Cli7ord performed well enough to lead Penn State to an 11-2 season with a Cotton Bowl victory in 2019, but the preseason commentary around the redshirt junior mirrored the commentary around Penn State's team as a whole: lots of potential, but some things still to prove. Then August arrived, and the attrition began setting in. Even before the Big Ten made the decision to postpone its 2020 season, Penn State su7ered a crushing blow to its title hopes when Parsons opted out because of the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, choosing instead to prepare for the NFL Dra8. In September, while the Big Ten was reconsidering its postponement, Brown was diagnosed with a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The coaching sta7 waited until Brown got a second opinion before announcing the news, but he had to sit out in the meantime, and when doctors did indeed con5rm the earlier result, their 5ndings brought an end to his playing career. Cain soon joined Brown on the side- line, as he su7ered a season-ending in- jury, believed to be to his ankle or foot, in the 5rst quarter of Penn State's opener at Indiana. Then, a8er playing in only four games, Freiermuth made the decision to have surgery on an injury that occurred in the second game of the season against Ohio State. That decision e7ectively ended his Penn State playing career, as he's all but certain to enter the dra8 in the coming weeks. So in a time frame of a little over two months, Penn State lost three proven, di7erence-making starters and, in Cain, one of its most exciting young players, who had just taken over a starting spot with Brown out of action. When you add to those losses the kind of injuries that occur over the course of a typical football season, injuries that this year cost Penn State the services of Tariq Castro-Fields, Devyn Ford, Keaton Ellis, Cam Sullivan-Brown and Oweh for a game or more, you start to get an un- derstanding of why Penn State entered its Big Ten Champions Week matchup against Illinois with a 3-5 record rather than the 7-1 mark that a lot of Penn State fans expected. Some might say another major con- tributing factor to Penn State's 0-5 start was the presence of four new assistant coaches on its sta7 – coaches who didn't get to meet face-to-face with their new players on a regular basis until mid-September. Those four sta7 mem- bers – o7ensive coordinator Kirk Ciar- rocca, o7ensive line coach Phil Trautwein, wide receivers coach Taylor Stubble5eld and defensive line coach John Scott Jr. – didn't have any spring practice sessions with which to get ac- climated. Nor was there a normal sum- mer workout schedule or a proper preseason camp to prepare for the 2020 campaign. Instead, the new coaches had PHIL'S CORNER Personnel losses created an impossible dilemma for Nittany Lions this fall A

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