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T H E M O N T H I N . . . Asked whether he would play in a bowl game – top picks Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey bypassed their postseason games last year – Barkley stiff- armed that subject. ... He brought the topic back around to "controlling what you can control" and finishing strong. "Obviously, you have goals, and you envision what you want to do," he said. "I visualized going undefeated. We're 8-2, and we hold ourselves to such a high standard that everyone thinks it's been a bad year. That's a good thing – that we hold ourselves to such a high standard." He has done his share to maintain and raise that standard, and however many games he has left, Saquon Barkley will be remembered on a very short list of Penn State's all-time greats – for how he played when he had room to run and how he kept his chin up when he didn't. NEIL RUDEL ALTOONA MIRROR It's almost a foregone conclusion that at the end of the season... Barkley, who is in his third year of college, will announce he is leaving for the NFL. Thursday night, in a veiled sort of way, his head coach gave him his blessing. "You can't al- ways tell them to come back to school," James Franklin said on his radio show, talking generally about college football players leaving school early. "And I'm dif- ferent than a lot of football coaches. If a guy is going to be a guaranteed 9rst- round dra: choice, he's got to consider it." MIKE POORMAN STATECOLLEGE.COM [Some] days you wake up and think you won't be sore and [instead] you'll be sore in places you've never been sore before. You're trying to 9gure out: Why am I sore? Did I get hit there? What happened? But that's football in November. TRACE McSORLEY O P I N I O N S Q U O T E S A C A D E M I C S Student-athletes shine in graduation survey Penn State student-athletes continue to graduate well above their peers na- tionwide, delivering a record-tying aca- demic performance, according to data announced recently by the NCAA. The NCAA's annual graduation rates survey revealed that Penn State stu- dent-athletes at the University Park campus earned a Graduation Success Rate of 90 percent to tie the school record, previously set in the 2010 report. The national average was 86 percent for students entering from 2007-08 through the 2010-11 academic year. Penn State student-athletes have de- livered a GSR in the 88 to 90 percent range during each of the past 11 NCAA reports, improving from 88 percent in the 2015 report, to 89 percent last year, to 90 percent this year. Nine Penn State squads earned a GSR of 100 percent, an increase of two teams from last year. The Nittany Lion squads posting 100 percent GSR scores were men's basketball, field hockey, women's golf, women's gymnastics, men's ice hockey, women's ice hockey, men's soc- cer, softball and women's tennis. The field hockey and women's tennis teams earned 100 percent scores for the 13th consecutive year, every year since the NCAA began releasing GSR data in 2005. The softball team posted a 100 per- cent GSR for the sixth consecutive year, and the men's basketball team had a per- fect GSR score for the fifth year in a row. For the first time, the NCAA report in- cluded data from Penn State men's and women's hockey student-athletes, with both teams producing 100 percent grad- uation rates. For the eighth consecutive year, the Penn State football (84 percent com- pared to 75 in Division I), Nittany Lion basketball (100 to 78 percent) and Lady Lion basketball (92 to 89 percent) teams all earned four-year GSR scores that were at least three points higher than the national average for their sports. ■ PSUtixman@gmail.com www.PSUtixman.com Get your PSU Football Tickets at go t ti cke t s? k c i t t t e k man@g .PSUtixm www. at ootba Get yo k c i t t o gm .PSUtixman.com all ur s t s e k

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