Penn State Football: Nothing But Home For Nittany Lions Moving Forward

Penn State football is really just 7 games into a very, very multi-year long season.

When you think about it, the advantage of being the second youngest team in Division I football is that not a whole lot changes from year to year. The players in theory should only get better, the team will continue to improve and in turn so will the results. That’s at least how it should work.

Certainly the divide between two actual seasons is a very real thing, and with five games remaining and a likely bowl bid to follow, there are plenty of things left to do for this edition of the Nittany Lions.

But really all Penn State is trying to do right now is build for the future. Recover from sanctions. And figure out what the direction of the program is from there.

And that all comes down to experience and time to develop players.

Penn State will get 15 practices if it makes a bowl game, a massive plus for a young team trying to move forward. That’s nearly an entire spring training camps worth of practice. Win or lose the bowl Penn State will get to self scout and coach players for two extra weeks. I may not sound like much, but its huge.

Playing at home helps too, and that’s where the schedule comes into play.

Penn State will play 8 of its next 11 regular season games at home. With a trip to Temple set to open the 2015 season, 9 of the next 11 games will be in the state. It’s 9 of 12 if you count this past weekend’s game against Ohio State. The only road games Penn State has to worry about in the immediate future are in Indiana and Illinois. Hardly the toughest and most stressful places to play.

A five game home stand is quite the rarity in college football, Penn State has only done it once way back in the early 1900s which may as well mean that it has never happened. The Nittany Lions have played four straight at home on a good number of occasions, but even that hasn’t happened frequently.

Does it make a difference? Only time will tell, but getting to play nearly a complete season’s worth of football at home is hardly the worst thing to have as a team rebuilding and  revamping itself.

As James Franklin has said many times before, — it’s a process — and what better place to work through a large portion of that process than the comfort of your own home?

When the stretch of home games finally finish? It’s back to Columbus to face the team that kicked off the whole thing in the first place.