James Franklin says Penn State was prepared for long weather delay

Not only did Penn State have to prepare for a road trip against a good opponent to start the season in Week 1 of the college football season, but the Nittany Lions also had to power through a longer-than-usual halftime break. That is because nasty thunderstorms blew through Morgantown, West Virginia as Penn State and West Virginia were looking to come out to start the second half of their game. Fortunately for Penn State, James Franklin had his team prepared for such a situation.

Franklin drew on previous experience to be ready for a two-hour weather delay in preparing for Penn State’s trip to West Virginia. In 2017, Penn State was stuck in a long weather delay in a road game at Michigan State. The Lions were not prepared to get through a long delay and continue playing the game, and it showed as Penn State ended up losing in an upset to Michigan State.

If not for that experience, Penn State could have suffered a similar result.

“Obviously after that situation, we kind of put in all types of plans and policies to be aware of,” Franklin said in his postgame comments following a 34-12 victory over West Virginia, referring to that 2017 game at Michigan State. “And it also helped that before coming here, we knew this was a possibility.”

The biggest thing Penn State was prepared for this time once getting a sense of the potential weather situation? Keeping the team fed.

“It’s hard to go to Chick-fil-A at closing time and ask them to stay open and come up with an order for a football team,” Franklin explained. “That’s what happened in East Lansing with Monica, our police officer, going to do that for us. So this was obviously a much better situation.”

Franklin went on to suggest that being the road team makes a long delay even more challenging.

“It’s still challenging when you’re the visiting team, because you’re stuck in a very small locker room. That’s not a critique on West Virginia. It’s like that everywhere,” Franklin said. “And they have all their facilities to be able to use. So there’s some real challenges that come with that.”

The longer the delay wore on, the more creative Franklin and his staff had to get. The solution? Make space for your team using the tunnel outside of the locker room.

“I think you guys saw we created, out here in the tunnel, some more space. I thought that was helpful as well,” Franklin said. “And then we just had plenty of food. Again, because we knew that this was a possibility, we were able to get ahead of it from that standpoint. So I thought that was a positive.”

Franklin added the team benefitted by having the use of iPads to review game film. In the two hour span, a lot of film breakdown and review could be done, and that gave the coordinators more time to make adjustments. Penn State’s adjustments just seemed to work better than West Virginia’s.

It also might be a complete coincidence, but after the second half eventually started, multiple West Virginia players had to be helped off the field. Was it better conditioning on the Penn State sideline and locker room as well? Or was that just a coincidence? It may be worth wondering as well.