Penn State played football in front of 63,000 soggy fans inside Beaver Stadium and thousands more throughout the tailgate lots.
The Blue Team beat the White Team, 10-0, in 2023’s spring game.
The highly competitive scrimmage came after a long winter break post-Rose Bowl win. Coach James Franklin and his team have big expectations to live up to in 2023.
This game wasn’t just the ones and twos battling freshmen and sophomores. It was a perfect split down the middle.
For Penn State coach James Franklin, Saturday’s scrimmage cemented those expectations, saying it capped off a “great spring.”
“I thought today was phenomenal,” Franklin said in his postgame press conference.
It also provided an arena for an imperfect set of conditions.
Warm-ups for today’s game were wet. The rain was coming down at a pretty good rate, but that ceased before the game started. The conditions were far from ideal, but the Big Ten is known for harsh conditions.
I was a little worried about the weather. Although, I would have come in here and said it was great wet ball work for us. But it cleared up. It was awesome all week long, and then we had the rain this morning. I think we would have had a lot more people in the stadium if the rain didn’t scare some people off.
Wide receivers were running routes. The quarterbacks were doing their typical 3-5 step drops and throw. The tight ends were working on blocking techniques, as were the offensive and defensive lines on the wet and slippery Beaver Stadium grass. Going through these conditions in a controlled environment will assuredly help down the road.
With those conditions, the coaching staff was able to evaluate the roster in an environment as close to an actual game as possible until the season kicks off on September 2nd against West Virginia. For that, it helped finish the spring on a high note.
I thought the team was broken up to be competitive, and I thought it really was. There was a lot of value in that.”
