It’s been 50 Nittany Lion football games – a pretty darn good 29 wins and 21 losses — and nearly 48 months since July 23, 2012, when the NCAA imposed those heavy sanctions on Penn State.
As Penn State prepares to start its third season under James Franklin, only a few scholarship players remain who have been with the Nittany Lions every step of the way.
Seven, to be exact:
Offensive linemen Derek Dowrey, Brian Gaia and Wendy Laurent; safety Malik Golden; defensive end Evan Schwan; linebacker Nyeem Wartman-White; and long snapper Tyler Yazujan.
It’s been almost a total transformation of Penn State football. And it’s been an adjustment – not just for the super seniors, but for all the players transitioning from Joe Paterno to Bill O’Brien to Franklin.
“My personality and the personality of some of our staff is somewhat different than the staff they were used to,” Franklin said a few weeks ago. “So it took some time to adjust to that, to the different philosophies and different approaches.
“It’s always a challenge when you’re a head coach and come in and take over a program. There’s always that issue of your recruits vs. the previous staff. Which always happens. But I think it was magnified here because those same recruits were almost all thrown into the fire right away because they had to. So it magnifies that sense of ‘your recruits and their recruits.’”
True, a few stalwarts remain, like the head athletic trainer, the lead academic adviser and the top video guy. But just about everything and everyone else has swiftly changed with Penn State football, from the sanctions being levied to them being lifted, from the turf in Holuba Hall to the inside décor and inner workings of Lasch Building.
The journey has paid off in a number of ways for those seven super-seniors. As they helped change the program, they’ve built a reservoir of inner strength and also buttressed their bank accounts. Unlike when they arrived back in 2012, each scholarship athlete now gets $4,788 in annual “cost of attendance” checks.
So you can get what Franklin is saying when he puts it out there that 2016 is “Year One in a lot of ways for us.”
After all, even those seven players have changed in big ways. Dowrey and Gaia came in as defensive tackles, and now Gaia will likely be playing center for the first time as a fifth-year senior this fall. Golden started as a wide receiver, then switched to corner. It was Wartman but sans White. Yazujan was a walk-on who didn’t play a single snap until his third season.
2012 FRESHMEN
Gone are 15 other freshman who signed up with O’Brien on Feb. 3, 2012:
From the freshman Class of 2012, Geno Lewis is now playing for the University of Oklahoma and Akeel Lynch is in Las Vegas at UNLV.
Austin Johnson, Jordan Lucas and Trevor Williams – who had a combined 94 career starts at Penn State among them — are getting set to attend their first NFL training camps.
Jesse James is already a pro football veteran as he enters his second season with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Some transferred early – like Jamil Pollard, Brennan Franklin and Steven Bench. And some announced they were transferring this past January – like Jake Kiley and Gary Wooten Jr.
A few gave up football and stayed at Penn State, like Jonathan Warner and Anthony Stanko, who’s spending the summer teaching fishing and outdoor skills to elementary-school kids in Oregon. Two were dismissed from the team by Franklin (Da’Quan Davis and Brent Wilkerson).
In their stead is a roster that is now nearly all Franklin born and bred. It is a Nittany Lion squad light on experience and heavy on underclassmen. For example, of the approximate 81 scholarship players on Penn State’s current roster, 64 (79%) signed with Penn State while Franklin was head coach, although 29 (34.5%) originally verbally committed to Penn State while O’Brien was head coach.
BY AND BYE THE NUMBERS
Here’s a breakdown of the scholarship players on the current Nittany Lion roster and their genesis:
Seventeen came in under O’Brien in the Februarys of 2012 and ’13. In addition to the above seven, they include: Brandon Bell, Parker Cothran, Curtis Cothren, DaSean Hamilton, Brendan Mahon, Andrew Nelson, Garret Sickels, Jordan Smith and Von Walker and Gregg Garrity (both originally walk-ons).
Only half of the 16 scholarship recruits in Penn State’s Class of 2013 are on the team of 2016. Two have departed with a PSU degree (Adam Breneman and Anthony Smith, who will play football this season at Monmouth University while pursuing a master’s degree) and one has advanced to the NFL (Christian Hackenberg). The other five, who left early or never made it to campus, are: Richy Anderson, Kasey Gaines, Tanner Hartman, Zayd Isaah, and Neiko Robinson.
Twelve verbally committed to Penn State while O’Brien was head coach between Oct. 16, 2012 (Mark Allen) and Dec. 29, 2013 (Chasz Wright), then signed up to play for Franklin in February 2014. In that group: Marcus Allen, Mark Allen, Noah Beh, Troy Apke, Jason Cabinda, Mike Gesicki, Chris Godwin, Nick Scott, Johnathan Thomas, De’Andre Thompkins, Antoine White and Chasz Wright.
Nine of the 2014 recruits committed to Penn State only after Franklin was hired on Jan. 11, 2014. Five of them were originally Vanderbilt verbal commitments who flipped to Penn State after Franklin left his previous institution for Happy Valley – Brendan Brosnan, Grant Haley, Trace McSorley, Amani Oruwariye and Chance Sorrell. The other four: Saeed Blacknall, Torrence Brown, Christian Campbell and Koa Farmer.
When Penn State starts training camp the first week of August, it will have 64 Franklin signed, sealed and delivered players on its roster. That’s counting the recent crop of freshmen who enrolled in classes at University Park last week and last year’s JUCO, transfer Paris Palmer, and is also assuming incoming Nassau Community College transfer Tyrell Chavis gets his transcript in order over the next few weeks.
In all, of the 81 scholarship players on Penn State’s current roster, 69 have two or more years’ worth of eligibility remaining. Just a dozen scholarship players are in the final year of their eligibility in 2016. Who’s in that group? Palmer is in his final season at Penn State, in addition to Bell, Walker, Garrity and Jordan Smith.
And, lest we not forget, so are the magnificent 2012 seven.
