Blue White Illustrated

the young men who come out of that area. A lot of them are very blue collar and are hard-working and are just look- ing for an opportunity to continue to grow, not only as athletes but also aca- demically. Obviously, Penn State gives that in spades. "But I'm not just taking it for granted. I'm going in and acting like the area is new to me and turning over every stone, making sure I'm evaluating every guy, whether he has no offers or many offers. I'm just continuing to recruit as hard as I possibly can. I think it's given us an op- portunity to be successful." Given Banks's performance at Penn State, it was probably only a matter of time until someone offered him the chance to take the next step in his career. But while the 2021 class has turned out to be the last one that he helped shape at PSU, he made a major impact, enabling the team to offset a series of setbacks elsewhere. The class may be significantly better than its Rivals.com rankings – seventh in the Big Ten, 26th nationally – would suggest, but there's no denying that the Lions missed out on some play- ers they wanted badly. Five-star offen- sive lineman Nolan Rucci, the son of former Penn State lineman Todd Rucci, chose Wisconsin in September. Four- star defensive end Elijah Jeudy headed to Texas A&M even though one of his for- mer high school coaches, Deion Barnes, is a Penn State graduate and a GA on James Franklin's current staff. And four- star safety Derrick Davis stunned the coaching staff when, after taking 10 vis- its to University Park, he abruptly an- nounced in November that he would sign with LSU, a school to which he had made only one informal family visit. Making matters worse, all three of those players are from Pennsylvania. While the Nittany Lions were doing better than one might have expected in Michigan, they weren't able to fully protect their own border. Many people will no doubt fixate on receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. and quar- terback Kyle McCord, four-star Philadel- phia prospects who signed with Ohio State. It's fair for fans to hold Franklin to the pledge he made at his introductory presser in 2014 to "dominate the state." But the truth is, those losses didn't sting quite as much as the ones listed above. Harrison and McCord were always going to be uphill battles; both players favored the Buckeyes from the start, and at the moment, Ryan Day and his staff are in the enviable position of being able to go any- where and sign anyone. But Rucci, Jeudy and Davis were all players that PSU ap- peared well-positioned to sign. That the Lions weren't able to close the deal with any of them is a concerning development. How concerning? That depends on where the team goes from here. One of the points that Franklin has emphasized over the past few months is that the pan- demic has been more harmful to Penn State's recruiting efforts than those of some other schools because its campus is tucked away in a rural valley in central Pennsylvania – the kind of place that re- quires a special trip, not the kind of place you can just stop by if you happen to find yourself in the area. Yes, some of the players that PSU lost were well-ac- quainted with campus, but others were forced to settle for Zoom calls and virtual visits that, for all the work that went into them, didn't capture the excitement of a real Penn State football weekend. If the pandemic starts to abate in the coming months and visits resume, it's reasonable to think that the Lions' recruiting efforts will improve accordingly. Another factor to consider is that Penn State will have more scholarships to offer in 2022. The Nittany Lions' 2021 class was always going to be small, and the formulas that the recruiting services use to rank classes take quantity as well as quality into account. Given the way that the transfer portal has changed the roster-management process in recent years, offering teams a new way of ad- dressing immediate needs, there's a case to be made that quantity is overvalued and that the Lions' No. 26 ranking this year is artificially low. If that's the case,

• Cover