Little rest on the road to improvement for Penn State

EVANSTON, Ill. — James Franklin made it clear: This week will be no vacation for Penn State.

This is not an off week, he said several times during his news conference after the No. 6 Nittany Lions’ 41-13 throttling of Northwestern on Saturday at Ryan Field.

This is a bye week.

And there’s work to do if Penn State is going to build on what it already has done.

“It’s going to be a huge bye week for us,” quarterback Drew Allar said.

In some ways, the Nittany Lions are limping into their first game-free weekend of the season.

Running back Kaytron Allen and left guard J.B. Nelson, two key cogs on a unit that ranks No. 15 in the nation in rushing offense, left Saturday’s game with undisclosed injuries and did not return. Receivers Harrison Wallace III and Omari Evans, expected to play vital roles in the passing game, have played only sporadically. Wallace caught 10 passes in the first two games, but none since, and he didn’t play against Northwestern. Evans has just one catch for 4 yards all season.

But the prevailing opinion around the team on the heels of its 5-0 start is this is the time to clean up issues that caused consternation in the early going, albeit on the way to weekly blowouts and the program’s first 10-game winning streak in 15 years.

Franklin said he and the coaching staff studied how best to handle bye weeks “in great detail” during the offseason, looking for a balance between helping banged-up players recover, keeping healthy ones fresh but also working through the issues that have been exposed.

“We’ve got to get better this week, but that’s the fine line, right?” Franklin said.

He said the coaching staff will use the week to “get ahead” on its preparation for future opponents before focusing on preparation for the Minutemen next week. While he didn’t refer to one particular opponent by name, the Nittany Lions’ always-season-defining clash with Ohio State is slated for Oct. 21 in Columbus.

By then, Penn State knows it has to play at an even higher level than it is now, one that it believes it can reach but hasn’t seen.

Getting there, Franklin said, begins this week.

“We can only get better,” Allar said. “We’ve got to take that mindset into it. Even though we don’t have a game next week, there’s still a lot to improve on, a lot of work to be done. And I think if we go in with that mindset of attacking each day, like we’ve been the past five weeks, we’ll come out of the bye week better and we’ll hit the ground running the following week.

“I’m looking forward to watching this game and then just overall taking a step back and looking at the grand scheme of things and seeing how we’re doing as an offense.”