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C OA C H S P E A K| EXCERPTS FROM JAMES FRANKLIN'S WEEKLY PRESSER Looking back, you scored eight touchdowns in 11 trips to the red zone in your previous three games, and I was wondering about the problems you had there against Michigan. Did they go beyond the offensive line and tight ends not being physical enough? That's probably the biggest point. I would say there've been games where we've matched up pretty well, and we've been able to be balanced and be successful there, and then there've been games where we haven't matched up real well and haven't been balanced, and it's thrown things out of whack. We had an opportunity to hit a fade to Geno [Lewis] that we didn't hit, and we've hit them the past couple weeks. We leB the ball off the field. They were physical up front, like I said, and were knocking some of our linemen. It wasn't the same guy all the time, but it would be one guy on one play and an- other one on another play. That was the biggest difference. If you look at our season, in the games where our D-line has had an advantage over their O-line or the games where our O-line has been able to battle and be scrappy with the opposing D-lines, we've been success- ful. In the games that have been out of whack, we've struggled. That's some- thing that we've been talking about for two years, and we're headed in the right direction but not as quickly as every- body would like, including me. What went into your decision to pull Paris Palmer at le> tackle and re- place him with Andrew Nelson against Michigan, and is that going to be a permanent move with Andrew? And also, your thoughts on protect- ing Christian Hackenberg better against Michigan State? Yeah, we were rotating some things around, like I said. We've had some challenges on the O-line. I wouldn't say it necessarily was just Paris. We were just trying to move some parts around to try to get the best guys on the field and create better matchups. Sometimes it's not necessarily about one specific guy or some team, but it may be about a matchup and moving a different part around or a different portion of our of- fensive line around to try to create a better matchup. You mentioned earlier that Michi- gan State has established a culture of winning. How long does that take to happen for a coach, and where do you think you're at Penn State regarding that process? It depends. I can't speak on Michigan State. I think if you look across the country, there have some programs that have won and won and won year aBer year aBer year, no matter what the cir- cumstances have been. I think it takes a number of years. I think we have had it historically, ob- viously, over the long haul, there's no doubt about it, but I think it takes some time. We're just coming out of some of the challenges that we've been through, that have had an effect, there's no doubt about it, but it takes some time. It takes some time in terms of creating your identity on offense, defense and special teams, and when I say your identity, I'm talking about the program's identity, and then also getting all the pieces of the puzzle meshing well together. That's the coaches, that's the players, that's the depth from the freshman, sopho- more, junior and senior classes and the older guys teaching the young guys what it takes to be successful academi- cally, athletically and socially, the whole package. It [involves] all those things, because you can't be successful in one area and not the others. You've got to do it in every area, and my focus right now is [ensuring] that we are doing it in a number of areas. We have to make sure that we're doing it in every area. You mentioned the special teams breakdowns. How about some reason- ing, at least from your point of view, on why the continual problems are occur- ring, especially with the coverage and the return games? Yeah, to be honest with you, we do this a lot. A lot of times the answers are the same. We've had problems with punting. We're rugby punting all the time now. We don't really kick for great distance, but it reduces return opportu- nities, so that's what we've been doing. We've been punting for about a 37-yard average. It's hard to swing field position that way. Some people are able to punt around 40, which is what you want, and then every once in a while you bang one and get a punt that really swings field position. And then on kickoff [coverage], we've been inconsistent. The one week we weren't planning on dribble kicking once and we dribble kicked every single time during the game and talked about it on the sideline and tried to coach and correct it on the sideline and weren't able to get it fixed. This past Saturday, we were kicking to about the 10-yard line with no hang time. Those things are going to create stress on everybody, so we've got to get those things solved through the development of the guys that we have and then con- tinue to recruit for the future. In your postgame remarks on Sat- urday, one of the things you said was, "We're burning too many timeouts because we're not getting the play call in and we're going to have some conversation about that." What was the tenor of the conversations like, and why does that continue to be a problem, wasting timeouts that way? We need to do a better job coaching, number one. Number two, we've got some young players who are making some mistakes, so we look out there on third down and maybe we're not aligned correctly on defense and we're going to give up a big play, and we're trying to decide whether it makes sense to burn a timeout and give ourselves a better chance to get off the field, or let it go. Or we signal a play in and it doesn't go in correctly or the personnel group may be wrong – a young guy is supposed to come off the field and doesn't come off the field. There are a number of reasons right now that we've got to get cleaned up, and I'm not pleased with it whatso- ever. We haven't really had this issue for N O V E M B E R 2 5 , 2 0 1 5 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 14

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