Penn State Football: five reasons for optimism for the Nittany Lions’ trip to The Big House

Reason for optimism #5 – the bye week

We’ve all heard about James Franklin’s 3-6 record coming off a bye week during his time at Penn State, but there have been some changes that suggest they may start performing better coming off their bye.

In the weeks leading up to the bye, James Franklin discussed that they intended on making some changes to their bye week approach. One minor adjustment was that they would have a little more practice time than they normally would have during the bye week. The other was that they’d spend a little more time preparing for the next opponent than they have in the past.

All we can do is speculate, but if I had to guess, that means in the past they would use the bye week as more of a self-scouting minicamp and really focused on themselves as opposed to using that extra time to prepare for whoever is next on the schedule. Instead, they would do most of that in the week leading up to that particular game like a normal game week.

We won’t know for sure if this will prove to be effective until Saturday afternoon, but the fact that they’re making adjustments to what has been an issue in the past is just more reason for Penn State Football fans to be optimistic heading into this game.

Plus, bye weeks are always beneficial for players to get healthy. The Nittany Lions have been lucky so far and haven’t really suffered any major injuries, but it doesn’t hurt to have a week off to rest the body while Michigan had to play last week.

Finally, the bye week could hopefully be used to break the negative momentum the team had coming off of a sloppy performance against Northwestern. That was certainly their worst performance of the year, so it’s good that the bye week came when it did do that didn’t snowball into Ann Arbor.