Penn State coach James Franklin was asked earlier this week about running back Caziah Holmes and defensive end Ken Talley both entering the transfer portal in recent days, but — predictably — Franklin didn’t want to get to into many specifics about their individual departures
“I don’t think it’s too far out of what we expected how things played out,” Franklin said of the timing of Holmes’ departure. “Obviously, whether it’s him or other guys, you know, we obviously want nothing but the best for them and their futures. It’s a very different college football that we all grew up with, but it’s part of the process.”
Holmes’ decision to leave the program wasn’t exactly a shocking one considering the depth of Penn State’s running back room and the arrival of five-star freshman back Nicholas Singleton on campus this summer. Holmes, a former four-star prospect, was used sparingly in 2021 amid the Nittany Lions’ struggles on the ground and did not appear to be a big part of Penn State’s ground game in the early stages of 2022.
Franklin generally admitted as much on Wednesday speaking to reporters, stating that Holmes’ departure didn’t really change the math for the running back room all that much.
As for Talley, who was the final arrival for Penn State’s 2022 freshman class, the four-star edge rusher from Philadelphia had yet to play a single snap for Penn State or even see the sideline in a career only a few weeks old.
“We don’t get into the specifics with any of these things,” Franklin said of why Talley had left. “I don’t think it’d be appropriate for me to talk about any of these guys in the specifics on why they’re leaving. That’s their personal business and we want them to be able to leave and go on and be successful. It didn’t work out for a variety of reasons.”
Generally speaking, Penn State hasn’t seen an abnormal amount of movement in the transfer portal since its inception. Certainly the Nittany Lions have lost their fair share of meaningful players over the years, but there’s a level of inevitably in that fact as depth charts change and recruits come and go. As Franklin noted while talking about the departures of Talley and Holmes, there’s only so much you can do to keep a team entirely happy. In fact, that might not even really be the goal.
“If you’re in a sport like football where you have 85 scholarships, and essentially, you’re going to have about 25 guys —11 on offense, 11 on defense, and then some special teams guys, specialists specifically — you’re always going to have a portion of the team that wants more,” Franklin said.
“You get that, that’s part of the recruiting process. But I also think we just try to be transparent and treat people the way we want to be treated. We also don’t over promise on the front end — some of these schools, they promise that they’re going to play as true freshmen and those types of things — to try to be realistic. I think we lose some recruits because of that, because we don’t tell them what they want to hear. But we just just try to be transparent and authentic. And you know I wish that that was embraced. The reality is everyone wants the truth. And not everybody always likes that.”
