James Franklin explains Penn State's travel issues for USC game

The Penn State Nittany Lions and head coach James Franklin are preparing for a challenging Big Ten test against the USC Trojans. It’s a game that should be a battle on the field in a new and unique road environment for Penn State.

An added challenge for Franklin and Penn State is finding a way to travel to Los Angeles. Because of that, the Nittany Lions are actually leaving a day early and headed to California on Thursday.

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“The second part of your question is a big part of us leaving on Thursday is we cannot fly out of State College,” James Franklin said. “So, that was a big part of our discussions with the Big Ten when this thing got started is not only are we one of the most northeast schools, but based on runway length, size of the plane, weight of the plane, fuel on the plane, we can’t get out of here unless we would stop for fuel. So, with that, we’ve got to fly out of Harrisburg.”

USC is, of course, one of four new schools that has joined the Big Ten. All of those new schools are on the West Coast, making for major travel issues, especially for the Northeast schools. Penn State, in particular, given how rural the school is has to find a way to deal with the difficult travel.

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“To me, that’s one of the things I think we have to discuss is increasing the size of the runway here and the size of the airport, for a lot of reasons,” Franklin said. “For the university, for the community, for businesses, for the athletic department, and for us now that we’ve decided to make this move as a Big Ten. To me, that’s something that we need to do for a lot of different reasons.”

James Franklin isn’t the only coach who is having this travel issue in the new Big Ten. It extends to all coaches in all sports and football, given that it is one game a week and played on the weekend, is actually one of the sports that has the easiest travel across the country.

“That’s a big part of it is, you’re talking about adding another two hours to your trip on top of the flight, and I think the flight is already five-and-a-half hours or whatever it may be,” Franklin said. “That’s pretty much a full day. So, that’s one of the big reasons for leaving Thursday.”

While traveling across the country isn’t easy for anyone, Penn State does come with added challenges. Still, James Franklin feels good about the team’s plan.

“Feel good about our plan,” Franklin said. “But that’s a big reason why and that’s something that I think we’re going to need to look at addressing moving forward because it does change things for us compared to a lot of other teams in our conference that either — even if they are northeast, they have an international airport and things like that within a short distance from campus. Kind of got the double whammy. It’s the distance as well as the airport.”

Penn State and USC are set to kickoff at the LA Memorial Coliseum at 3:30 p.m. EST on Saturday.