Blue White Illustrated

and he's progressed in the year that he's been here, as a football IQ guy, as a blocker, as a route runner. So I'm really, really excited about him." –David Eckert 4 How will the Lions' COVID precautions a5ect their o5- season drills? With any luck, this won't be as big a problem as it was last fall. During the 2020 season, the Nittany Lions' prac- tices were hampered by a series of false- positive results arising from the team's daily antigen testing regimen. Since then, however, Penn State has taken that testing equipment off-line. Athletic di- rector Sandy Barbour said in January that the five analyzers in the Lasch Building were sent back to the manufac- turer. If they've been replaced by more- reliable equipment, Penn State will have solved one of the more vexing problems that dogged it during the regular season. But the underlying problem – the con- tinuing threat of COVID – hasn't gone away. Like most of the country, Penn State's athletic community saw a spike in cases after the holidays. According to the testing results that PSU has made public on a weekly basis, the two worst weeks of the pandemic were Jan. 16-22, when 37 of the 1,994 tests the athletic department conducted came back posi- tive, and Jan. 23-29, when 33 of 2,208 tests were positive. Since then, however, the numbers have been trending down, with a total of 37 positive tests between Jan. 30 and Feb. 27. That works out to an average of 9.3 positive tests per week in February, a substantial decline from the previous month when the average was 23.5 per week. Penn State doesn't release its re- sults on a team-by-team basis, so we don't know how many positive cases the football team has had, if any. We do know that the women's volleyball, wrestling and men's ice hockey teams have had to pause activities in the past few months due to positive tests. Even if the football team is able to stay largely COVID-free, as it did last fall when it was one of only two Big Ten teams that were able to play all nine of their scheduled games, it could face some unique challenges this spring. One of those challenges has to do with the scheduling of facilities. As of this writing, there were 28 Penn State varsity teams in action. In addition to the winter sports teams that are always finishing up their seasons this time of year and the spring teams that are always starting up in Feb- ruary and March, PSU has resumed com- NUMBERS GAME: These stats must improve for PSU to rebound W ith last season's disappointing 4-5 er averaging 5.7, 5.9 and 6.4 yards per play during the previous three seasons. Penn State had just six plays of 40 or more yards in 2020. The year before, it had 22. TURNOVERS The Nittany Lions turned the ball over 17 times in just nine games, ranking among the worst 30 teams in the country even though many teams in other conferences played more games. THE KICKING GAME One of the reasons for Penn State's poor red zone percent- age was a shaky year from its kickers. A season after missing just two of their 15 attempts, Jake Pinegar and Jordan Stout combined to hit 11 of 18 field goal tries in 2020. So the Lions left 21 points on the board from kicking situations alone – 22 when you add in a missed extra point. –DAVID ECKERT

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