James Franklin breaks down how daily schedule changes during bye week

Penn State heads into their bye week unbeaten and ready for a week of rest. Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin was asked about how their bye week schedule differs from a normal game week, and highlighted the changes in practice, game planning, and recruiting throughout the week.

“When we’re here in State College, not a whole lot different. We’re doing a little bit of recruiting during the day, but mostly it’s football, we got the recruiting staff handling that,” Franklin said.

Bye weeks lend themselves to more scheduling flexibility, especially regarding recruiting and practice, as Franklin went day by day through what Penn State’s week will look like.

CLICK HERE to subscribe for FREE to the On3 YouTube channel

“The biggest difference obviously is we’re gonna practice today (Tuesday), we’ll practice tomorrow, and then most of staff will go on the road recruiting. The coordinators and the GAs will stay, they’ll have a practice on Thursday, then the coordinators will get out Thursday after practice and then we’ll recruit all day Friday, obviously all day Saturday, and then get back into town ready for somewhat of a normal Sunday,” Franklin explained. “Obviously we got a head start, but that’s the biggest difference in terms of our week, we’re obviously spending most of our time game planning and even trying to get ahead on a few opponents as well.”

The Nittany Lions have a big matchup against No. 4 Michigan following their bye, followed by a slate of tough Big Ten opponents. Penn State surely will not be looking past the defending Big Ten Champion Wolverines, but may use some of the extra time from the bye week to look ahead a little bit as well as make sure their players and staff are rested.

“Obviously our focus is on our next opponent, but with some of the staff we have they’re able to get ahead on those things because what you hope is we’re able during this bye week to rather than staff meet at seven, staff meet at eight. Because part of the bye week is also making sure everybody’s fresh, not only the players but the coaches as well, but then also that should show up in next week as well because you should be ahead,” Franklin said.

Penn State seems to have a nice balance of rest and preparation implemented into their bye week, and they’ll also have eyes on this weekend’s action and implement that into their upcoming game plan, as they look to remain undefeated moving forward past week 7.

“So if you can get an hour of sleep in the morning or take your kids to school all those things, there’s benefits of it and what we have to take is all our data and then obviously the games that are played this weekend we gotta add that too our data and then we also have to double check our game plans based on what we’re thinking,” Franklin said. “Did this week reinforce what we thought or do we need to tweak some things from there. But that’s kind of our plan, we have a checklist of things, normal downs, red zone, third down, so on and so forth every single week that we follow.”