Blue White Illustrated

T H E M O N T H I N . . . I know it's natural for folks to want to look ahead and dream of great things to come and that's doubly true of sports fans. The lure of next season is almost al- ways more enticing than the reality once it arrives. The dream of 15-0 is all that will sate some. But I think the 11-3 that happened this season was great. It was the most entertaining and buoyant football season I've ever experienced because it was played with abandon. That has almost never been true of Penn State foot- ball, a program too often burdened with the gravity of expectations, run in the style of a corporation and deploying an offense that never colored outside the lines. DAVID JONES PENNLIVE.COM So, broken hearts? No, not really. Certainly not forever. "We have a bunch of players on this team – week-in, week-out, it doesn't matter what the score is, no one is giving up, we're all persevering," said [Mike] Gesicki, sitting there in his skivvies. "We did that all season long. I couldn't be prouder of every person in this locker room." Penn State showed it had heart all season. Since the sum- mer of 2012, really. And now – thanks in a big way to a gritty group and James Franklin, who truly and somewhat miraculously and finally somehow got every- one pulling the rope in the same direction – the future for Penn State football is rosy. Again. MIKE POORMAN STATECOLLEGE.COM [James Franklin will] eventually get around to dissecting the slow starts that forced an uphill climb all season and caught up to the Lions here a9er they spot- ted USC three two-score leads in the 7rst half – 13-0, 20-7 and 27-14. And cer- tainly many will debate whether Penn State should have played for overtime, rather than aggressively throwing a late interception that USC turned into the game-winning score. But neither should overshadow the body of work the Nit- tany Lions le9 on the 7eld this year and the foundation they re-established for a Penn State program that 7ve years ago looked 10 years away from a game on this stage. NEIL RUDEL ALTOONA MIRROR Perhaps "The Granddaddy of Them All" o8ered an appetizer to a future College Football Playo8 matchup. Without question, the Nittany Lions and Trojans could meet again in the 2018 Rose Bowl, with a spot in the national champi- onship on the line. Or maybe they'll save the rematch intrigue for the title game itself. Both teams 7gure to be at least in the preseason top 10, possibly the top 7ve, and while polls that come out in August rarely hold up, they're still indica- tive of talent and expected performance. JOHN McGONIGAL CENTRE DAILY TIMES I know this probably sounds crazy, but I wouldn't be any more proud sitting here tonight with a win. JAMES FRANKLIN on Penn State's performance in the Rose Bowl Obviously, this loss sucks, but [the team will] use it as motivation in the o8-sea- son. We were so close to being Rose Bowl champs and we still have so much work to do, and we're still a young team with a lot of guys coming back, so use that as motivation and try to be the best team we can be next year. SAQUON BARKLEY O P I N I O N S Q U O T E S FOOTBALL Barbour: CFP snub won't affect Lions' scheduling Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour said prior to the Rose Bowl that she was "disappointed" the Nittany Lions were not chosen to play in the College Football Playo8. The Lions had two losses, while the Huskies had only one. But Barbour pointed to strength-of-schedule factors that favored Penn State. A9er their vic- tory over Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship Game, the Lions were 2-1 against teams in the top 15 of the playo8 standings and 3-2 against teams in the top 25. They were also 7-2 against teams with winning records heading into bowl season. Washington was 1-1, 3-1 and 5-1. "I was certainly disappointed," Bar- bour said. "I'm good friends with the AD at Washington, so this is not a slam on them, but the committee kind of did go away from what they had been talking about in terms of strength of schedule. [There was] a lot of chatter around that. "It proved out with Ohio State getting in. So it kind of worked both ways." Barbour added that Penn State is not going to change its approach to noncon- ference scheduling in hope of boosting its record in upcoming seasons. "We're going to stick with our sched- uling from a nonconference standpoint: one Power Five, and we're going to bring some great games to Beaver Stadium," she said. – N.B. [creating] an inviting, welcoming, warm environment for our families, and that makes a difference. It really does. For a lot of us it does. Maybe not for every- body, but for me personally, that's a huge, huge box on my checklist of where I want to be. He certainly makes that." So after a tumultuous 2016 off-sea- son, in which the Lions had to replace both of their coordinators as well as their offensive line coach, it appeared as of mid-January that Franklin's staff was set to return intact in 2017. – M.H.

• Cover