Practicing under the lights Wednesday, in just helmets, practice jerseys and shorts with no pads, much of the post-practice talk centered around the adjustments Penn State is making this week in preparing for Saturday’s game at Northwestern.
That extends beyond the scaled-back practices in order to ease the wear and tear on the players before what will be PSU’s 10th consecutive game of the season. It also has to do with Northwestern’s style of play and Saturday’s game atmosphere.
- When James Franklin coached at Vanderbilt he played at Northwestern in 2012, falling to the Wildcats 23-13, and this week he’s calling upon that away experience. Without mentioning the specific difference between Ryan Field in Evanston, Ill., and other stadiums, he said the 47,000-seat stadium presents a different set of challenges, noting how “it’s a different environment than a lot of the Big Ten venues that we go to. So that is going to cause some issues.”
Having coached there before, he said, "I think we have some perspective, not only on them, but also the environment there. It’s something we’ve talked about all week long – being prepared for the environment. I’ve talked to coaches this week, and that’s something that I think is an advantage for them – the environment there. So we have to be ready for that. … That we have played against each other a couple times now is helpful.”
- Another issue that has Franklin’s attention is the early kick off, which will be 11 a.m. local time in Evanston.
“It’s an hour earlier than we normally play, so the game is going to come fast,” he said. “What you have to be careful of a lot of times when you are playing on the road in this type of environment and playing at this time of the day, if you look, a lot of people have opened up slow. They’ve sleep-walked through the first quarter, so (they’re) talking to our guys about that and being prepared and being ready.”
As an example of the complications that early – or extremely late – kickoff times can create, Franklin referenced a home-and-home series against Cal while he was at Maryland in 2008 and ’09.
“I remember one year at a previous institution, we played Cal at our place at 12:00, which was 9:00 their time in the morning,” he said. “We got after them pretty good (winning 35-27). The next year we went to Cal and it was a night game. I think it was 8:00. It didn’t work out so well for us (losing 52-13). So there are challenges that come with that.”
- In order to prevent a similar fate when traveling to a different time zone this weekend, Franklin is continuing to modify this week’s practice schedule, specifically, by rolling back the times of Friday's meetings and walk-through so his players can more easily adjust to the one-hour difference when they're in Illinois on Saturday.
He said the coaches goal is to have the players’ “body clocks go off at the right time so they’re ready to play.”
To do that, he added, “We’ll adjust the schedule. Actually on Friday we’re going to bump all of our meetings up an hour earlier. The problem, as you guys know with young people, they’re probably still not going to go to bed at 8:45 like we’d like them to.”
- Another modification to practice this week was having Trace McSorley lead most of the first-team offense against the first-team defense. Franklin said he did that Tuesday in order to give the defense a better sense of what to expect when facing dual-threat quarterback Clayton Thorson, who ran for a season-high 126 yards and threw for 177 more to account for all but 30 of the Wildcats’ total offensive yards in a 30-28 win over Nebraska last week.
“Whenever you can replicate the speed in practice and not hold a card up and allow those guys to call our plays and our system, the same plays they’re going to see on Saturday, or we’ve seen in past weeks, it’s helpful,” he said. “It’s better than third-team O-linemen trying to looking at a card and trying to block it that way. It doesn’t work that way.”
Despite struggling against dual-threat QBs most of the season, it's the first time Penn State has taken this type of approach at practice this year.
“It just came down to, are we going to shift that time away from the offense?” he said. “In high school a lot of (times) you have an offensive practice and you have a defensive practice. When we do that we’re taking a 10-minute period and giving it all to the defense.”
- One other quick note: Andrew Nelson was getting work with the first-team OL. From the little bit of practice we watched, the rest of the OL appeared as this: LT - Palmer; LG - Mangiro; C- Laurent; RG - Dowrey; RT - Nelson.
That extends beyond the scaled-back practices in order to ease the wear and tear on the players before what will be PSU’s 10th consecutive game of the season. It also has to do with Northwestern’s style of play and Saturday’s game atmosphere.
- When James Franklin coached at Vanderbilt he played at Northwestern in 2012, falling to the Wildcats 23-13, and this week he’s calling upon that away experience. Without mentioning the specific difference between Ryan Field in Evanston, Ill., and other stadiums, he said the 47,000-seat stadium presents a different set of challenges, noting how “it’s a different environment than a lot of the Big Ten venues that we go to. So that is going to cause some issues.”
Having coached there before, he said, "I think we have some perspective, not only on them, but also the environment there. It’s something we’ve talked about all week long – being prepared for the environment. I’ve talked to coaches this week, and that’s something that I think is an advantage for them – the environment there. So we have to be ready for that. … That we have played against each other a couple times now is helpful.”
- Another issue that has Franklin’s attention is the early kick off, which will be 11 a.m. local time in Evanston.
“It’s an hour earlier than we normally play, so the game is going to come fast,” he said. “What you have to be careful of a lot of times when you are playing on the road in this type of environment and playing at this time of the day, if you look, a lot of people have opened up slow. They’ve sleep-walked through the first quarter, so (they’re) talking to our guys about that and being prepared and being ready.”
As an example of the complications that early – or extremely late – kickoff times can create, Franklin referenced a home-and-home series against Cal while he was at Maryland in 2008 and ’09.
“I remember one year at a previous institution, we played Cal at our place at 12:00, which was 9:00 their time in the morning,” he said. “We got after them pretty good (winning 35-27). The next year we went to Cal and it was a night game. I think it was 8:00. It didn’t work out so well for us (losing 52-13). So there are challenges that come with that.”
- In order to prevent a similar fate when traveling to a different time zone this weekend, Franklin is continuing to modify this week’s practice schedule, specifically, by rolling back the times of Friday's meetings and walk-through so his players can more easily adjust to the one-hour difference when they're in Illinois on Saturday.
He said the coaches goal is to have the players’ “body clocks go off at the right time so they’re ready to play.”
To do that, he added, “We’ll adjust the schedule. Actually on Friday we’re going to bump all of our meetings up an hour earlier. The problem, as you guys know with young people, they’re probably still not going to go to bed at 8:45 like we’d like them to.”
- Another modification to practice this week was having Trace McSorley lead most of the first-team offense against the first-team defense. Franklin said he did that Tuesday in order to give the defense a better sense of what to expect when facing dual-threat quarterback Clayton Thorson, who ran for a season-high 126 yards and threw for 177 more to account for all but 30 of the Wildcats’ total offensive yards in a 30-28 win over Nebraska last week.
“Whenever you can replicate the speed in practice and not hold a card up and allow those guys to call our plays and our system, the same plays they’re going to see on Saturday, or we’ve seen in past weeks, it’s helpful,” he said. “It’s better than third-team O-linemen trying to looking at a card and trying to block it that way. It doesn’t work that way.”
Despite struggling against dual-threat QBs most of the season, it's the first time Penn State has taken this type of approach at practice this year.
“It just came down to, are we going to shift that time away from the offense?” he said. “In high school a lot of (times) you have an offensive practice and you have a defensive practice. When we do that we’re taking a 10-minute period and giving it all to the defense.”
- One other quick note: Andrew Nelson was getting work with the first-team OL. From the little bit of practice we watched, the rest of the OL appeared as this: LT - Palmer; LG - Mangiro; C- Laurent; RG - Dowrey; RT - Nelson.
