Pat Kraft compares college football calendar to Frankenstein

The current college football calendar can feel like a monstrosity at times, so seems to think Pat Kraft. The Penn State athletic director likened it to the classic novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

The monster in that story was created of several different body parts forced to fit together to make something resembling a human but that wasn’t quite the same. Similarly, Kraft believes the college football schedule feels a bit disjointed and outdated, calling for a change.

“We have to look at the football calendar,” he said in a Monday press conference. “The calendar, if you look at it, recruiting and everything, is like Frankenstein. It’s bits and pieces from years of just putting this here, putting that there and we’re in a totally new world.”

The upcoming college football season will mark the fourth since the NIL era began in 2021. This past season was also the first for the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff, which concluded on Jan. 20.

That is roughly two weeks longer than the season had been prior and also overlaps with the winter transfer portal, which opened Dec. 9 and closed Dec. 28, well before many teams, including Penn State, ended their seasons.

That led to some teams losing players to the portal. The Nittany Lions lost backup quarterback Beau Pribula, who had appeared in all 13 games, before their playoff run even began.

There’s been some discussions about potentially expanding the CFP field to 14 or 16 teams, but Kraft argued that the schedule must be fixed before that.

“That does relate to the CFP because if you’re gonna add two more games, per se — if you go 16, no one really gets a bye,” he said. “I gotta be honest, I don’t know if that’s good, bad or indifferent right now. When you look at what happened, I’d like to keep our team moving and not take those two or three weeks off. But I also think we have to look at when do you start the season to do that? How do you not have a Beau situation?

“We’ve gotta look at the portal. I mean, we’re all evaluating spring football right now. That’s a question we’re gonna walk up to. I don’t know what next year’s spring football is gonna look like. But that’s in context of the whole 12-month calendar.”

Pat Kraft clarified that he is still in favor of further playoff expansion. However, he believes there needs to be a clear vision for what the schedule will look like if that is the case.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to go to 14 and 16,” he said. “The more teams in and the more kind of tournament you have, I think it’s great. I just — we’ve gotta continue to look at all the other aspects of that. If you have 16 teams what are we going to play into March? Are we gonna go into February?

“Like, football players do go to class. They gotta go to school. So what are we doing? I think we have to understand the bigger impact of that. I don’t have the answer, but I do know it’s being discussed. I’m not opposed to 14 or 16. I just want to know more about what does that whole calendar look like.”