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go with this. We are looking forward to taking advantage of all those, but more importantly making sure our guys have a great experience and an opportunity to play well." The Lions' bowl invitation, coming on the heels of the Sandusky scandal and the NCAA sanctions that followed, is a :tting reward for the seniors who stuck by the program during its darkest hours and deserve to have something good happen to them. It's important, too, for the freshmen and sophomores on this team – 76 in all. If there's going to be a turnaround in the coming years, they're going to be the ones leading it. The op- portunity to take part in what amounts to a second preseason camp, during which they will be able to focus on fun- damentals, should prove invaluable, re- gardless of whether it produces immedi- ate results against Boston College. As for the rest of us, the interlude be- tween the end of an up-and-down regu- lar season and the kicko; of the Pin- stripe Bowl provides a chance to assess the big picture without getting swept up in the frustration of a loss or the eupho- ria of a win. Franklin took a lot of heat during a reg- ular season in which Penn State lost six games, the most since 2004. Some of that heat was to be expected. He had paid a lot of attention during the o;-season to marketing the program, and the succes- sion of tweets and videos and promo- tional pictures of players with Nittany Lion logos Photoshopped into their eye- balls made it inevitable that he was going S T A F F P R E D I C T I O N S > > NATE BAUER WEBSITE EDITOR What Penn State needed most during the 2014 season was for it to be over. In a sense, the Nittany Lions :nally were granted that respite by the time Michigan State had :nished o; a 34-10 drubbing at Beaver Stadium the Saturday a=er Thanksgiving. Weary bodies and minds :nally received a much-deserved break. The stresses that come with trying to play major-college football with a group of healthy scholarship players numbering in the low 40s were just too much for this growing group of players and coaches, and it showed. With nearly a full month to recuperate and refocus, I expect the Li- ons to be a better team when they take on Boston College. How much better? Let's not get carried away. Some of the team's biggest problems this season – speci:- cally along the o;ensive line – were deep-rooted and unavoidable. Even so, the time should help that group and, by extension, the rest of the o;ense. Both teams feature e

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