Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/877736
P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> gets the ball, he's usually running into a good look. So getting him involved in the kickoff-return game, we're guaranteed that he's going to get a touch." Barkley is, of course, a threat to break a long run whenever he finds open space, and kickoffs provide him with room to maneuver. When the Lions needed a boost late in the Rose Bowl last season, they put him deep and got a 33-yard runback. Said Franklin, "I just feel like he's got a chance, whenever he touches the ball, to create an explosive play." But the circumstances of his first re- turn of the year – on the opening kickoff of the second half of the Akron game – led to some second-guessing. Penn State was up 35-0 at the time, it had a couple of seemingly capable returners in Miles Sanders and Brandon Polk cooling their heels on the sideline, and there didn't seem to be any reason to expose the team's most indispensible player to unnecessary risk. But Franklin said he wasn't convinced that the outcome had been decided with two quarters still to go, and to under- score his point he made an oblique ref- erence to the UCLA-Texas A&M game, in which the Bruins overcame a 34-point deficit late in the third quarter to win. "I know everybody keeps talking about how they felt like the [Akron] game was in hand. Well, if anybody watched col- lege football [on opening] weekend, I don't know if you necessarily could say that," he said. "I'm very comfortable with [the decision to use Barkley on kickoff returns], and we'll continue to do that." Barkley, too, pushed back against the suggestion that he shouldn't be han- dling kickoffs in lopsided games. "I don't play with that mindset of, oh, we're up 35, why am I back here?" he said. "When you play with that, that's when I think bad things start to happen. If anything is going to happen, it's going to happen anyway. I'm a real firm be- liever in that. I just come out every sin- gle day and try to work my butt off, push myself and push the guys and try to be a great leader and take advantage of every opportunity, because you never know when it will be your last." It's an open question whether Barkley will share the kickoff-return role during the Big Ten season. But this much is cer- tain: the Nittany Lions could use some more dynamism in this area. As has been the case with the punt- return game, the Lions haven't gotten a lot of breakaway returns on kickoffs in recent years. They were 10th in the Big Ten last season with an average of 19.7 yards per attempt, fifth the year before (21.9) and seventh in 2014 (20.9). The last time they scored a touchdown on a kickoff return was in 2011, when Chaz Powell took one back 95 yards in a sea- son-opening 41-7 victory over Indiana State. –M.H. 23g protein & 280 cal! Pumpkin now available at: on campus hub-robeson center n