Marcus Freeman and James Franklin Talk 2024 Season and Orange Bowl

Here are some of their comments from their time with the media: 

Freeman On Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price

"I'll start with Jadarian. He's a young man that has put a lot of work to get to the point that he's at now. He constantly gets better. You've heard me talk many times about, you have to earn that trust in practice from your coaches and your teammates way before the media and the world sees you. Jadarian's a guy that continues to do that, and he takes advantage of his opportunities and he's getting more and more opportunities."

"Jeremiah has had a good week of practice. We have to be smart about how much we're asking him to do in practice. We've got to get him ready for the game. I don't think anybody feels 100 percent right now. We're in week, or game 15. Maybe game 16 for you [James Franklin]. Nobody feels 100 percent but J love will be good to go."

Freeman On Being Independent

We view it, I view it as a pro and we'll continue to look at it that way unless something changes. We get to play coast to coast. You play multiple different teams against multiple different conferences. You start the season at College Station and end the year in LA, and we're in New York twice. We get to really view our program as a national program in terms of how we play and the audience we play in front of. Now, it's not much different from the Big Ten now with USC and UCLA and some of the west coast teams being in it. Again, we view being independent as a positive thing, and we sell it to our recruits and our players as a positive thing. We know we can't play in a championship game and we can't have a first round bye, but we continue to use not playing in week 13 as our bye. That's the way we view it. In terms of the finances and the TV deals, I'm sure Pete Bevacqua can go into further details about that, but obviously that's another positive we view being independent provides us." 

Freeman On Running The Football And Stopping The Run

"I think for us it's what we do well and what we have to do to have success with this current team. You know, as you look at the course of our season, it's been a big indication of the outcome of the game. Our ability to run the football and the ability to stop the run is a mentality, it's a mindset. Just from my defensive coaching back ground, when you can't stop an offense from running the ball, it can be demoralizing, that's why we say we have to do it." 

"Now, we probably rank higher in pass efficiency in defensive statistics, but still the mentality of stopping the run is important. As you get later into the season and play better teams, that's what is going to be important, right? Same goes for turnover margin. As you look at Penn State, if you're not able to do a good job stopping the run and trying to run the ball, you're not going to have success and you won't have the outcome that you want."