Spring practices are officially in the books for Penn state this year. So what happens next for head coach James Franklin and his program before they open up the 2021 college football season in Madison, Wisconsin a mere 133 days (but who’s counting)? Following Penn State’s spring practice in Beaver Stadium on Friday night, Franklin laid out how he sees the offseason moving forward.
In a typical offseason, this week after spring practices would be when Franklin and his coaches hit the road hard on the recruiting trail. But the NCAA has set a date for June 1 for recruiting to begin going back to normal, so Franklin and his staff must continue to do things remotely. Instead, Franklin said this time can be served to meet with players already in the program.
“Obviously, we’d be on the road recruiting and we won’t do that, so we’ll do individual meetings with all the players,” Franklin said Friday night. “That will be a priority.”
Of course, the NFL draft is also this week, and Franklin says he and defensive coordinator Brent Pry will head to Cleveland to join linebacker Micah Parsons. Parsons is expected to go in the first round of the draft, beginning Thursday night, and Parsons will be one of 13 players attending the draft in person.
What James Franklin said about NFL draft prospect Micah Parsons
Due to how the calendar played out this year, and with Penn State taking advantage of the calendar to stretch spring practices out an extra week than originally planned, Penn State had to reshuffle some plans.
“Then, this extra week of spring ball that we had, extra based on the calendar, we went a week longer than we had anticipated, so it kind of took up one of our discretionary weeks, so now we have another discretionary week in the summer, which is which is a true voluntary period for players,” Franklin explained.
Franklin didn’t go into too many details about scheduling offseason events but did note that plans will include summer camps, summer school for players, offseason workouts including lifting and running, 7-on-7s, and time for coaches meetings leading up to June. Franklin would like for the month of July to be focused on family time for everyone inside the program before getting back to the grind of preparing for the 2021 season beginning in August.
This offseason schedule may still not be the most ideal schedule for Franklin and Penn State, but it already sounds like it will be more normal compared to everything that went down in the 2020 offseason.
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