Blue White Illustrated

P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> bout a month ago, just as Penn State was wrapping up its spring practice sessions, columnist Tom Fornelli of CBSSports.com touched off a minor squabble on BWI's Lions Den message board by putting the Nittany Lions near the top of a short list of teams that he thought were unlikely to meet expecta- tions this coming fall. "To be clear, I still think Penn State is going to be a very good football team," Fornelli wrote. "It's going to finish the season ranked, and probably closer to the top 10 than somewhere between 20 and 25. All of that being said, odds are this is still a team that's going to take a step back. I mean, it won the Big Ten last season. Do you believe it's going to re- peat that feat this season? Even while it plays in the same division as Ohio State and Michigan? I'm skeptical." When I say minor squabble, I mean minor by internet standards. No one threatened to picket CBS headquarters or file a libel suit. But a number of read- ers did disagree with Fornelli's premise, with one saying he was "skeptical of this person's reasoning, or lack thereof," and another asserting that it was the work of a "doubter who writes for attention." It's inevitable that people are going to find predictions like Fornelli's irksome. In the comments that followed his col- umn, there was also some anger over his inclusion of West Virginia and Colorado. (Temple and Western Michigan, the other two teams on his list, didn't seem to get a rise out of visitors to CBS- Sports.com.) But most of the back-and- forth had to do with Penn State. And while a backlash probably was in- evitable, Fornelli's viewpoint wasn't en- tirely unfamiliar. One could even view it as the darker, more ominous flip side of a message that James Franklin himself was proffering this spring. Now that he's engineered a break- through season at Penn State, Franklin's challenge is to sustain that success. Whenever he talked during spring prac- tice about the program's trajectory, he returned to that theme, noting that the Lions' 11-3 finish and Big Ten champi- onship were merely steps in the rebuild- ing process that he undertook when he became head coach in 2014, not a culmi- nation. He returned to it again after the Blue- White Game, in which the Blue offense got off to a slow start before taking charge of the game in the sec- ond half behind the play of backup quarterback Tommy Stevens. Franklin said that Penn State has been benchmarking itself against the top programs in the nation, looking at their routines and habits and how even the most seemingly minute detail "be- comes a part of their culture: how they practice and how they train and how they eat and how they sleep and what they drink – all those things we call a championship lifestyle. It's ingrained in everything they do. And what happens is that the seniors and the juniors teach the sophomores and the freshmen, and when the new class comes in, it just be- comes part of what you do. "We are headed in that direction," Franklin concluded, "but I wouldn't say we're there yet. I think we still have some things left in the tank." One of the difficulties for Penn State as it works to reach its final destina- tion is that at least one of the pro- grams that it must compete against annually has already got- ten there. Since Urban Meyer ar- rived in Columbus, Ohio State has gone 61-6 and won a national championship. The Buckeyes have never lost more than two games in any IN FOR THE LONG HAUL A James Franklin knows that the true measure of the program he's building at Penn State will be whether it can sustain its success

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