James Franklin pushing Penn State football staff to be ‘very aggressive’ in transfer portal

James Franklin and Penn State football are now head-first into the busiest month the program has seen since the 11th-year head coach took over the Nittany Lions top job in January 2014.

Over the last week, the Nittany Lions have inked a top-15 recruiting class, battled the nation’s No. 1 team within a touchdown of the Big Ten Championship, and earned the right to host a first-round matchup in the school’s first-ever College Football Playoff appearance.

But a hectic December will get even crazier starting Monday with the opening of the transfer portal. And following last week’s detour to Indianapolis for the conference title game, Penn State may have some additional ground to cover in the opening days of the portal window.

Franklin is pushing Penn State football staff to be “very aggressive” in transfer portal amid playoff run

© Jordan Prather-Imagn Images

It’s for this reason that James Franklin is directing his assistants to be assertive and work expeditiously once the portal opens on Monday morning.

“We’re moving [on the portal], and I’m pushing my staff to be very aggressive,” Franklin said in his first College Football Playoff press conference on Sunday. “The challenge that I don’t think a lot of people think about is, typically, when your season ends, and you’re in that time getting ready for a bowl game, you have time to sit down with all of your players and find out what’s going on: who’s coming back, who’s considering going into the transfer portal, who is going into the transfer portal. And a lot of those things impact your decision-making on who you’re going to try to go out and get to replace those guys with.

“So it’s hard to come up with a plan. We’ll do that this week. But we’re probably a week behind other programs. I didn’t really want to be having those conversations last week when we were getting ready for Oregon. So, that’s a little bit of a challenge.

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“It’s hard to totally know what you want to do in the portal until you know exactly what’s going on with your current roster for next year. But I’ve asked our staff to be aggressive and move and make some decisions in positions that we think we’re going to have some needs. So, we’ll have a better idea this week.”

The Nittany Lions have already lost backup tight end Jerry Cross and wide receiver Feyisayo Oluleye to the transfer portal in recent weeks. Many of the gaps that Franklin’s staff will attempt to address are likely to be similar to those explored in previous cycles, including receiver, defensive back, and depth along the trenches.

After a one-week hiatus, Penn State football will return to action on December 21 when the Nittany Lions host SMU in the first round of the College Football Playoff.

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