Blue White Illustrated

and yelling and cussing us out and mooning the buses as we drove by. I know that sounds strange." It does indeed, but the 2020 season was a strange one for Penn State – for two main rea- sons. The first, obviously, had to do with the un- precedented circum- stances under which it was played. Some of those circumstances, like the empty parking lots and quiet venues, were all too apparent. But others weren't. There were plenty of hardships that fans and media didn't see: the daily testing regimen, the ever-present fear of a COVID outbreak, the disjointed practice and meeting rou- tines that prevented players from build- ing the kind of bonds that help teams persevere through hard times. The second reason why Penn State's season was so strange is that there were some hard times. The Nittany Lions may not currently be one of the sport's handful of reigning superpowers, but they're in the tier just below, and they aren't used to getting dunked on like they were early last season, dropping their first five games after falling behind by double digits in all of them. Never in their 134-year football history had they started a season with five consecutive losses, and that painful experience left a mark. Even after turning things around with four victories in a row to end the year, they still decided to pull them- selves out of bowl consideration, finish- ing with the program's first losing record since 2004. It's hard to disentangle all the ways in which last season felt abnormal. The Nittany Lions suffered a stunning come-from-ahead defeat at Indiana in their opener, followed it with a loss to Ohio State in which they weren't able to rely on their usual White Out crowd to give them a boost, and then, their pre- season goals having already slipped away, went into a tailspin that continued up until an unexpected victory at Michi- gan on Nov. 27. Because the on-field part was the only part that everyone saw, it was easy to think of it as its own discrete thing, separate from all the other prob- lems that marred a dreary year. But from the players' perspective, the on-field re- sults were a byproduct of the isolation they felt throughout the off-season and into the season itself. "That is, I think, the biggest [factor] in how we performed last year," said Jor- dan Stout, the team's punter and kickoff specialist. "We weren't just playing for ourselves; we were still playing for the team. But not as much as usual. Usually when we get to hang out in the summer and the spring and all through the fall without any boundaries, we get so much closer. I feel like when we get closer, we're playing for our brothers, not our- selves. I feel like that was a big part of it." If Stout is right, if one of the reasons for Penn State's slide last year was that the team's chemistry was off, then there's reason to feel optimistic about its potential for a bounce-back campaign in 2021. Thanks to the ongoing rollout of >> A FACE IN THE CROWD Franklin is eager to get Beaver Stadium filled again this fall after a 2020 season in which his team played in a succession of empty venues. Photo by Mark Selders/Penn State Athletics

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