The entire country is preparing for Tuesday, April 16th in the college football world. That’s when the spring window opens for players to officially enter the transfer portal. Coaches and teams are expecting to lose key players but also strengthen their rosters as well. The Penn State football team will face this exact fate over the next few weeks. Following the Blue-White Game on Saturday, Nittany Lion head coach James Franklin addressed his plans for the weeks ahead with players and coaches.
James Franklin preparing for ‘interesting couple of weeks’
The transfer portal has given players the freedom to find the right home. But it also has created a roster management challenge for almost every college football team. The Penn State football team has already faced this in 2024 with reports of wide receiver KeAndre Lambert-Smith considering the transfer portal himself. The Nittany Lions are currently sitting at 99 scholarship players, so some changes are likely to follow.
Ahead of the transfer portal opening on Tuesday, James Franklin shared his thoughts on the next few weeks at Penn State.
“Really next on the schedule is all players will meet with their position coaches on Monday. All day Monday, all day Tuesday then half of the day on Wednesday. Then the coaches will hit the road and travel Wednesday night to go recruit. I’ll start my meeting once they’re done in meeting with their coaches. I’ll be with every player on the roster.
“Usually takes about three weeks to knock that out, half hour per player. That will be valuable as well. As we know what’s going on with college football, this could be an interesting couple of weeks for everybody in college football. We just had a discussion about that in the locker room as well.”
Coach Franklin explains transparency with players
One of the more difficult areas to address with the transfer portal is not knowing what decision a player will make. That’s on the coaching staff to be ahead of and to be transparent about the plans for a given player. At the end of the day, no one will know until a decision is made and James Franklin understands the importance of that relationship being a two-way street.
“So when I say an interesting couple of weeks in college football. There’s a lot of reasons why that’s interesting. For me, that’s what these meetings are going to be about. The individual meetings with our position coaches. The meetings with me.
“We’ve had some conversations with some of our guys already. But at the end of the day, you never really know until it happens. I think we got pretty good relationships where guys, for the most part, have been very transparent and honest with us and we do the same thing with them…”
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