For the better part of the last decade Penn State coach James Franklin has announced just prior to the season green, yellow and red light players. These are true freshman ready to play, nearly ready to play or headed toward a redshirt season.
Things largely have panned out as announced with the likes of Micah Parsons, Joey Porter Jr. and others seeing the field from Day 1 and beyond; others in the yellow category sometimes drifting upward and often downward toward a redshirt freshman season.
There is an inherent fluidity in all of this. No matter what Franklin says in late August, things will change over the course of the season, both good and bad. The depth chart will change and freshmen will develop at various speeds. So really, does being a green light freshman mean anything days away from the first game of the year? Franklin argues that it doesn’t.
“I met with those guys last week. I don’t know if there’s a ton of value in sharing it with you right now,” Franklin said on Monday. “The reason I say that is because I met with them again yesterday. I said, ‘Let’s just be perfectly clear: just because you’ve been given the green light, if you’re not showing us you’re ready against Purdue, you’re not playing, or you’ve been given a yellow last week but then all of a sudden the lights come on for you and you’re doing some really good things, now you’re trending towards being a green.’
“That’s really a very fluid kind of conversation throughout the year. Obviously it gets to a point, about mid-season, where you kind of got to make some decisions one way or another. Either you’re moving ahead in playing guys or you’re going to try to use the four-game model and save guys.”
Obviously some incoming freshmen will see the field no matter what. Defensive end Dani Dennis-Sutton and running back Nicholas Singleton are locked-in guarantees to see the field this season. When is to be determined, but certainly not if.
The rest might have to be patient though. The good news, of course, is that the still relatively new NCAA rule that allows true freshman — or others — to play four games without losing a year of eligibility means that plenty of players could sneak onto the field and still receive a redshirt year, something that often is the best of both worlds.
“The challenge is for all these guys that are 18 for the most part, they’re not really built to see the big picture,” Franklin said. “They all just want to be able to play so they can say they played as true freshmen. I get that, but we’ve also had guys that have done that, then at the end they go, If I knew it was going to play out the way it played out, I’d like to have the year back, make a different decision. I try to keep talking with these guys, if not every week, every other week, to be able to gauge that, monitor that, be on the same page. There’s some guys that we have tagged at green right now, but I don’t know if they’re going to see week-one action.”
So don’t worry. If you don’t see your favorite freshman prospect on Thursday, you could see him later on down the line. Be that next week or next year. Time will tell which is the case.
