Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1525333
6 0 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 4 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M J ames Franklin is the kind of guy who sweats the details, so when he learned on Sept. 8, 2014, that the NCAA had rescinded the most onerous of the remaining sanctions against Penn State's football program, his immediate impulse was to find just the right words to personally convey the exciting news to his players. He was already too late. "The players pretty much found out on social media," Franklin lamented the following afternoon. "That's just how it is nowadays. I tried to get a mass text out to the team as soon as I possibly could, but they were already finding out. I just reinforced what they already knew." In fairness to the various social media platforms that players were fixated on at the time, there was no chance the story wasn't going to immediately go viral on campus and around the broader Penn State community. Former Sen. George Mitchell, who had been appointed by the NCAA as Penn State's athletics integrity monitor fol- lowing the Sandusky scandal, had issued a 58-page report recommending that the team's bowl ban and remaining schol- arship restrictions be discontinued. The NCAA approved the measures shortly af- ter receiving Mitchell's report, and sud- denly Penn State was eligible to play its first bowl game since losing to Houston in the Ticket City Bowl on Jan. 2, 2012. Even more significant, the program was to see its scholarship cap return to 85 in 2015. Before Mitchell began calling for its relaxation in 2013 and '14, the cap had been 65 scholarships up through the 2017- 18 academic year, with the coaches per- mitted to award no more than 15 scholar- ships annually through 2016-17. The NCAA's reprieve was viewed at the time as a major step forward for Penn State. Looking back on it 10 years later, it certainly is one of the most consequential developments of the Franklin era. The Nittany Lions ended up signing a full 25-player class in 2015, and it included eight prospects who committed after the START OF SOMETHING BIG The NCAA's decision 10 years ago to abandon its remaining sanctions set the stage for a Nittany Lion football revival M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M Less than a week after the NCAA ended its bowl ban, James Franklin and his players celebrated a 13-10 comeback victory over Rutgers that raised their record to 3-0. PHOTO BY STEVE MANUEL