Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1544665
4 8 M A Y 2 0 2 6 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M E D I T O R I A L MATT HERB MATT.HERB@ON3.COM VARSITY VIEWS S pring football games don't count. They usually aren't particularly re- vealing, and often they're not even very entertaining. Despite all these seemingly insur- mountable drawbacks, spring games have been one of college football's more durable traditions. With a handful of high-profile exceptions — LSU, Ole Miss, Florida State, Missouri, Wiscon- sin and NC State chief among them — most Power Four programs held an open scrimmage of some sort this spring. It was a marked contrast to last year when a wave of cancellations by major programs gave rise to speculation that the spring transfer portal was going to kill off exhibition football. Instead, the spring portal is gone, and the exhibi- tions are (mostly) still with us. Penn State was one of the Power Four programs that chose to continue open- ing up its final session of the spring to the public. It was notable, however, that PSU billed this year's event as the Blue- White Practice rather than the Blue- White Game. Head coach Matt Campbell was ada- mant throughout the spring that the Nittany Lions needed to make the best possible use of their 15 sessions. If that meant the open scrimmage wouldn't be something as legible as a game, so be it. "We can't waste a practice," Camp- bell said. "These are critical reps for our football team." You can understand why Campbell and his staff wanted to tamper with the game's familiar format. He is essentially trying to mash together two separate teams this spring, one made up of re- turning players and another comprised of players who followed him to State College from Iowa State. All of those players need as much hands-on coach- ing as they can get if they're going to jell into a cohesive unit this fall. You can also understand why Camp- bell wanted to have the last of those hands-on coaching sessions take place in a stadium that was at least partially full. Nearly all of the 40 transfers who joined Penn State's program in January came from programs where the venues were about half the size of Beaver Sta- dium. Iowa State's Jack Trice Stadium holds 61,500, and the average atten- dance for the Cyclones' six home games last year was 60,862. The Beav is going to be an entirely different environment, and that was part of the reason why Campbell wanted to finish off spring drills with an open scrimmage. A week prior to the Blue-White Practice, Penn State held one of its spring sessions on its home field. Even with the stands empty, play- ers were taken aback by their surround- ings. Said Campbell, "There were a lot of big eyes walking into that stadium and seeing how powerful it feels to walk in there." That dynamic is surely going to change in the years ahead. Penn State isn't going to be as reliant on the trans- fer portal as it was this year. When high school recruiting once again supplies most of the roster, PSU will be able to bring players along the old-fashioned way, introducing them to the game-day experience as freshmen before they're asked to play major roles. At that point, decisions about what form the Blue-White Game should take — or whether it should exist at all — will depend on other considerations. Some of those are business consid- erations. As an athletics institution, Penn State may be comparable in scale to Ohio State, Oregon, Michigan and other major schools, but its surround- ing community is not. State College (population 41,490) is more depen- dent on sports tourism than Columbus (946,661), Eugene (178,961) and Ann Arbor (122,509). Spring game atten- dance may be in decline all over the country, even at places like Ohio State that used to set records, but the Centre Region business community would very much like for this tradition to continue. Even more important, though, is whether an open scrimmage provides the Nittany Lions with maximum value. Campbell's predecessors weren't so sure that it did. Joe Paterno was so ambivalent about the contest that he used to hold his Blue-White press conference before kickoff. Bill O'Brien could barely conceal his disdain for the game and would al- most certainly have killed it if he'd stuck around a few more years, especially after one of his key players, running back Zach Zwinak, suffered a broken wrist in 2013. And James Franklin, while perhaps more diplomatic than O'Brien, seemed to share his predecessor's concerns about the game's risk-reward ratio. Whether Campbell comes around to that way of thinking remains to be seen. In the meantime, this much is certain: Nothing that happens in Beaver Stadium in the spring is going to be remotely as important as what happens there in the fall. That, ultimately, is the criteria that should determine the future of the Blue- White Game. ■ PSU Must Make The Most Of Its 15th Practice Matt Campbell has emphasized the need to make good use of Penn State's final practice of the spring. "These are critical reps for our football team," he said. PHOTO BY RYAN SNYDER