Penn State Football After Dark: Homecoming Contest Begins a String of ‘Night Shift’ Games

Under coach Matt Campbell, Penn State football practice is held early in the morning, with coaches and players arriving at Lasch Building before the sun comes up. For the next month or so, they’ll now be playing football after it sets.

“I told our guys we’re on the night shift for a while,” Campbell said this week. “I feel like 18- to 22-year-olds like the night shift sometimes.”

The early-evening and night-time portion of the Nittany Lions’ schedule begins on Saturday in Beaver Stadium against Wisconsin. Kickoff for the Homecoming contest is slated for 5 p.m. Sunset in Happy Valley will be at 7:02 p.m., so pretty much the entire second half will be played under the full force of the Beaver Stadium lights.

That’s just the beginning of Penn State After Dark:

8 p.m. — Next Friday, Oct. 2, the Nittany Lions open Northwestern’s new $900 million stadium, the new Ryan Field, with a nationally-televised game on FOX.

7:30 p.m. — On Oct. 10, the Nittany Lions play host to USC in the annual White Out game in Beaver Stadium, televised by NBC.

7:30 p.m.? — On Oct. 17, Penn State travels to Michigan to face the Wolverines in The Big House. A kickoff time has not yet been set, but Ohio State is playing at Indiana this day, so you can bet that FOX — which, as the lead owner of the Big Ten’s broadcast rights — almost always gets what it wants. And no doubt, FOX will grab that contest for a Big Noon kickoff.

PSU at Michigan has all the makings of a prime-time game, especially if both teams keep on winning. Other big games that day feature SEC match-ups Florida at Texas and Alabama at Tennessee, and both will be on the ESPN/ABC family of channels. Notre Dame is at BYU, so NBC — which holds the exclusive rights to Irish home games — could be open to a second Nittany Lion Saturday night game in a row.

Campbell said his team, which has done the bulk of its work in the early mornings in spring drills and in the fall, “will adjust a little bit.”

“We’re a morning practice team, so Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we stay normal,” Campbell said on his radio show earlier this week. “…I think where I’ve always felt like you really maximize this morning practice block is when you get to Friday and Saturday and night games where our guys really start to bank sleep and have an opportunity to kind of truly fill their tanks. So by the time we get to 5 o’clock, 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock, whatever that may be, our guys are ready to go. I think our guys are looking forward to this.”

WHAT THE PLAYERS SAY

The Wisconsin game will feature Penn State’s first late start time of the 2026 season, Campbell’s first at Penn State and also the first for the two dozen Iowa State players and countless coaches and staffers who followed him to PSU. The season-opener against Marshall in Beaver Stadium started at 3:30 p.m. The Nittany Lions’ next two games — at Temple in The Linc and at home last week against Buffalo — both started at noon.

So, for the most part, the current Penn State football contingent is not accustomed to hanging out in their hotel for most of game day as a collective whole. (Though you have to think they’ll spend part of the time actually watching GameDay on ESPN).

A pair of new Nittany Lions told me this week this is how they plan to spend the hours leading up to the Wisconsin game, and at least the next two contests as well. Neither player was at Penn State last year:

Safety Jeremiah Cooper, who spent the past four seasons at Iowa State, where he started 36 games: “This changes pretty much our whole schedule we have throughout the week, when we’re still used to mornings. The weekend schedule — we have to find our process of how we go about things. We’ve been playing at noon, at 3:30, and now at 5 p.m. and later.”

On game day, Cooper said, “we’ll probably do meetings in the morning, maybe a quick walkthrough, stretch. [Campbell] doesn’t want to overload us too much because it’s game day. It’s more about the mental side of things.”

Punter Nathan Tiyce, a native of Australia who played for Mississippi State last season: “I try to visualize and just relax and treat [a night game] like it’s another day. Try to conserve as much energy as possible. Watch some college football games. Just hang out with the boys, really. Hang in someone’s room, chat, play cards, something like that. With a night game, we’ll shift the visualization and the breathing to the morning of the game. And as it gets closer, we start building up, building up. Then, it’s go-time.”