Penn State returns to campus Monday for the first set of summer classes.
It will start its summer practice schedule nine weeks before fall camp. One of those weeks will be a discretionary student-athlete week. The other eight will be spent with strength coach Craig Fitzgerald and consist of players-only, no-pads practice sessions, including 7-on-7 drills.
Penn State will certainly have much to work on. It’s got a brand new offense to learn and refine, and the playbook, we’ll get into that in a bit.
This is one of the most critical periods for the team’s development, from physical conditioning and retention of spring concepts to timing in pass patterns. The summer will help determine how much of the offense first-year coach Bill O’Brien pares back come training camp.
Coaches can’t watch or participate in the summer. But they haven’t completely abandoned the team. They provided DVD cutups of film from the spring. It can use another video element called the “HUDL System” on its iPads, allowing players to study the offensive and defensive systems anywhere — the HUB, downtown, during class.
And then there’s the playbook, imported from New England.
Fact: Players don’t have the full playbook, which runs as thick as the NCAA rulebook, O’Brien said. Instead, it works more like a reference library. Coaches pluck what they want and dish it out in increments.
“If you give them a whole playbook, it’s an intimidating playbook,” O’Brien said. To put that in perspective, last year’s NCAA manual ran 434 pages.
The coaching staff threw as much of the terminology and playbook at the team as it could in the spring, so once fall camp rolled around there would be no surprises.
O’Brien said about 10 percent of the offense was shown during April’s Blue-White Game.
But think again you if you think Penn State will have the whole playbook in its arsenal this season.
“Maybe five years down the road you’ll have it all in,” O’Brien said.
Oy vey.
But that’s not exactly a stretch. O’Brien needs to identify, recruit and — most importantly — lure the personnel that can run his offense at Penn State. That process takes time.
So what’s it gonna look like in 2012?
“You just try to look at your team, think about what type of team you have,” O’Brien said. “Like, you have a pretty good fullback, so you know you’re gonna be in two-back formations. You have four or five decent receivers, so you know you’re gonna be in some empty formations. You have three or four decent tight ends, so you know you’re gonna be in some two- and three-personnel groupings.
“So you take those sections out of the playbook and really focus on those. You don’t try to do everything because that’d be impossible.”
The playbook isn’t all New England, though that’s the bulk of it. Georgia Tech has its stamp on it from when O’Brien coached there from 1995-2002, and every year since, more and more was added.
It grows almost daily. Anytime the staff has a new idea, it goes into the glossary.
“Our system is not numbers as much as it is word association for routes,” O’Brien said. “So ‘pickle’ is a route or ‘parachute’ is a route. ‘Special’ is a route. Anytime we come up with a word — we all think we’re English majors.
“So I wanna run this combination with this combination, what would I call that? OK I’m gonna call that ‘read.’ All right that’s new, OK put it up there and define it on the board, and at the end of the day we update the playbook. We keep a running tally, so it grows.”
Here’s the blunt truth:
“That’s why you can’t hand that playbook to a 17-year-old kid coming in from high school,” he said. “It’d be ridiculous to think he could learn all that.”
And that may not be a bad thing, with classes starting and all.
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