The 10 biggest ‘what ifs’ for Penn State Football recruiting

3. What if the NCAA Allowed Some Type of Visits in 2020?

The Covid-19 pandemic affected a lot of things and college football recruiting was one of them.

The NCAA followed suit with the rest of the country and decided to shut everything down in March of 2020; no practices, no games, no visits.

While this was the right call in the Spring of 2020, as we all tried to learn more about the virus and how to adapt with this change in our lives, could something have been worked out in the summer and fall?

By the middle of the summer in 2020, many states started to reopen in some capacity with safety measures in place. By the fall, football games were being played and most southern schools even had some sort of capacity limit for fans. If these other things could be done safely, couldn’t visits as well?

It’s a difficult topic to find a solution to and there probably is no right answer, but the truth is Penn State’s recruiting efforts in the 2021 cycle greatly suffered due to a lack of visits. The Nittany Lions landed only 17 commits in the cycle and the class finished 21st in the national rankings, the lowest since 2014, Franklin’s first class.

Franklin and his staff thrive when they get recruits on campus and get to spend time with them and show them around town, especially inside Beaver Stadium. We know this tactic is effective because visits reopened this past summer and Penn State ended up with the No. 6 class in 2022 and currently has the No. 3 class in 2023.

Had Penn State been able to have 2021 recruits on campus with masks, social distancing and a limit on how many visitors were allowed on campus at a time, would it have made a difference in the recruitments of Nolan Rucci, Kelvin Gilliam, Jack Pugh, Moliki Matavao, Derrick Davis Jr. and others? It’s surely possible.