Blue White Illustrated

had to walk a tightrope in its efforts to promote the program. It had to send a message to recruits that the university was still a great place to play big-time college football while simultaneously asserting that the program knew its place in the school's institutional hier- archy. It wanted the world to know that Penn State took football seriously, but not too seriously. Calibrating that mes- sage was no easy task, and O'Brien, for all the talk that he was merely a football coach and not a PR wiz, performed it beautifully, projecting a sense of sobri- ety while also putting a product on the field that players and fans could get ex- cited about. Under Franklin, the tone is different. It's less measured, more freewheeling. The Nittany Lions are promoting the program the same way other big-time football schools promote theirs. If other schools can throw a party on signing day, the thinking goes, why not Penn State? If Michigan can hang a giant yel- low "M" on the exterior of the Big House, why can't Penn State hang a gargantuan chipmunk on its score- board? The fact that Franklin now heads up the Nittany Lion program is, in itself, a testament to the school's desire to re- join the likes of Ohio State and Alabama and Oregon atop the national polls. One of the reasons Penn State has been able to make this turn is because it has done a lot of things right as it has worked to recover from the scan- dal. The positive reports that George Mitchell has submitted in his role as independ- ent athletics monitor are measures of its seriousness, and there are other in- dications that Penn State is recovering, both on the field and off. The Nittany Lions' recruiting success – 10 four-star prospects in four months, as of this writing – has been well documented. So has the success of the university's Olympic sports teams, which accounted for three national championships and a school-record eight Big Ten titles over the past year. Less well known is that applications for undergraduate admission are up 19 per- cent from a year ago. And that the aver- age SAT score of an entering freshman is 20 points higher. And that in the Times Higher Education World Univer- sity rankings, Penn State has risen to No. 39. Given all that, it's not so surprising that Penn State would want to market itself more forcefully. The new signs – yes, there's one attached to the south scoreboard, too – might seem extrava- gant, even though they require only 330 watts to power up, less than most cof- fee pots. They might be extravagant. But when it comes to self-promotion, subtlety is no virtue. ■ n a clear day, the new Penn State logo atop Beaver Stadium's north scoreboard comes into view as you round a bend on Fox Hollow Road on your way into town from the University Park Airport. On a cloudy day? Well, it comes into view at pretty much the same spot. Truth is, the atmospheric conditions don't matter much when you're talking about an ob- ject that measures 35 feet by 25 feet, weighs 6,500 pounds and boasts 1,400 LEDs. It has been dubbed James Franklin's "bat signal" and that's before a single watt of electricity has been pumped into those lights. If you think this thing is impressive now, just wait till they plug it in. "I love it," Franklin said, as if there were any doubt. "I was in Alabama [recently], and when I was coming back from the airport, you could see it over the top of the trees. You could see the logo on the back of the stadium. It was really cool. I think it'll be even cooler at night when it's lit up. I think branding is really, really important, that you're reinforcing your message over and over again." Franklin has been thinking a lot about branding these past few months. Unlike his two predecessors, who viewed the program's promotion as an obligation they needed to fulfill in order to do the parts of the job they truly enjoyed, the Nittany Lions' first-year coach has handled this task with genuine enthusi- asm. If you've seen a snapshot of him recently, odds are he's had his index fin- ger jabbed in the air in that classic "We're No. 1" gesture that has quickly become his go-to photo-op pose. If you've been paying attention to his Twitter feed, you've seen some inter- esting Photoshop art, from images of Penn State players with Nittany Lion lo- gos superimposed over their pupils, to a half-Franklin-half-lion mash-up that he posted the day before the Blue-White Game. Whatever one may think of his coaching, he and his staffers are cer- tainly more adept than Bill O'Brien at using the clone stamp tool. Some people find the word branding irksome now that it has made its way out of the business world onto college cam- puses and the covers of self-help books. They view it as a cor- porate buzzword that either means nothing or, worse, something nefarious, an attempt to address real problems by changing the talking points. But none of that appears to bother Franklin in the least. As he made clear at several stops on the recently concluded Coaches Caravan, he views marketing as one facet of a job that requires him to wear many hats, and it's one that he's quite happy to fulfill. "One of the first things I do every single morning," he said, is to "get on the Internet and study what's going on in terms of creative ideas, in terms of marketing, in terms of branding, in terms of recruiting and in terms of facilities. There's a real big push right now in sports science, so we have to make sure we're embracing that and doing our studies with those things as well." It would be easy to come away with the impression that Franklin is fixated on trivial matters, like dreaming up Twitter hashtags or approving Christian Hackenberg's new mug shot. More like- ly, he simply brings a detail-oriented mindset to bear on every aspect of the program; public relations just happens to be the part of the program that every- body sees. Franklin's approach may be new to Penn State fans. It certainly differs from that of his predecessors. But, in a crucial way, his eagerness to promote the Nit- tany Lions marks a return to normalcy. In the aftermath of the Sandusky scandal, Penn State J U D G M E N T C A L L Sign of the times Emboldened program receives an emblem of its grand ambitions O Matt Herb

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