Bill O’Brien’s Penn State Football On-the-Field Thanksgiving List

Bright spots and reasons for optimism. Those are reasons for Thanksgiving.

On Tuesday, Penn State football coach Bill O’Brien was asked to look back at the Nittany Lions’ 6-5 2013 season thus far and also look ahead to the program’s future for some bright spots.

And he found plenty for which to be thankful.

“I do think there’s been a lot of positives, said O’Brien, later adding, “I feel really good about where the program’s at.” The specifics include an aura of good feeling O’Brien has about his younger players, the pipeline of recruits likely coming in 2014 and maybe 2015, and an excitement about Penn State’s future.

Here are 10 items on O’Brien’s list:

CHRISTIAN HACKENBERG: “I think the fact that we’ve been able to play a freshman quarterback in every game and he’s stayed healthy — and I believe he’s gotten better and better — I think that is a real positive.”

THE RUNNING GAME: “I believe that for the most part we’ve run the ball pretty well on offense. I think that’s a positive.

DEFENSIVE IMPROVEMENT: “I believe our defense has improved every single week. I think the last three weeks, our defense has played well and a lot of younger players or guys that have years left here at Penn State have played a lot of football for us on defense.”

MONDAY SCRIMMAGES: “We’ve been able to get our younger players a lot of work in practice with the Monday night developmental scrimmages. That’s a positive.”

PLAYING TIME: “We’ve got a bunch of guys on this football team that gained a lot of experience this year, which I think will really help them. Some guys were playing college football for the first time, like Geno Lewis who red‑shirted last year and was playing in a college football game for the first time. Jordan Lucas didn’t play a lot for us his first year. Now he comes in and he’s one of our better players.

RETURNING VETERANS: “We have a lot of veteran players that have played a lot of football for us, that are coming back next year that we feel really, really good about.”

THE CLASS OF 2013: “I think if you look at the ’13 class that we brought in here recruiting‑wise, from what I can see right off the bat, I don’t think there are any ‘busts.’ I think there are role players and guys that will continue to have roles for us. I think there are some really good players that nobody’s even seen yet that are red‑shirting. And then obviously the guys that played this year for us — the Brandon Bells, the Hackenbergs, the (Adam) Brenemans and those guys.”

RECRUITING: “We feel good about the future. We feel good about where we’re headed recruiting‑wise. Every single home game here we’ve had a lot of great prospects here.”

THE CLASSES OF 2014 AND 2015: “I can’t really get into the details of that because that’s an NCAA violation, but we feel good about the ’14 class, and we feel good about the ’15 class, because you’re always trying to stay one step ahead. So we’re recruiting hard with the 2015 class.”

THE FUTURE: “I think our program — with the two‑year sanctions that we’ve been under and things like that with the limited amount of guys we could offer and guys that left the program — stands on pretty solid ground right now.”

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