Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/944007
F O O T B A L L Freshmen could make big impact this fall The potential for early playing time is an enticement for many recruits, one that coaches often use to help lure top talent. As Alabama's Tua Tagovailoa showed last month in the national championship game, players are better prepared than ever to make a speedy transition from high school to college, even at positions with steep learning curves. Tagovailoa's three-touchdown passing performance in the Crimson Tide's overtime victory over Georgia was a reminder that sometimes when preparation meets opportunity, some- thing beautiful happens. And sometimes it doesn't. Things might have worked out for the Tide, but no program wants to be too reliant on incoming players, and that includes Penn State. As the Nittany Lions' schol- arship roster has grown larger with the relaxation and eventual discontinuation of the NCAA's sanctions, the number of true freshmen who have seen action has steadily decreased. Nine true freshmen played for Penn State in 2014, James Franklin's first season as head coach, and seven of those players made at least one start: Marcus Allen, Jason Cabinda and Christian Campbell on defense, Chris God- win, Mike Gesicki and Saeed Blacknall on offense, and Daniel Pasquariello at punter. The following year, only five true freshmen played, and four of them earned starts, the most notable being Saquon Barkley. That number stayed flat in 2016, with five true freshmen seeing action, and last season, only three got on the field: defensive end Yetur Gross- Matos and cornerbacks Lamont Wade and Tariq Castro-Fields. Will that downward trend continue in 2018? Probably not. Franklin and his staff just completed work on Penn State's most highly rated class in more than a decade, as the Lions finished fifth in the Ri- vals.com team rankings. So an abundance of talented players NEWS & NOTES MIDDLE MAN Parsons excelled as a defensive end at Harrisburg but will start out his Nittany Lion career at the mid- dle linebacker spot. Photo by Bill Anderson C O M M E N T A R Y B Y M A T T H E R B