Veteran Leadership and Young Talent
If you ask James Franklin, this 2025 Penn State team isn’t just another squad. It might be the best he’s ever had from top to bottom.
“This is the best combined personnel that I think we’ve had at Penn State,” Franklin said at Big Ten Media Days. “And when I talk about personnel, I’m talking about players and staff, from a depth, from a talent standpoint, and from an experience standpoint.”
That’s saying a lot considering this is Franklin’s 12th season running the program.
He credited the roster’s strength to a mix of homegrown development, smart recruiting, and the right transfer additions. It starts with his leaders—guys like Drew Allar, Nick Dawkins, and Zakee Wheatley. All three were at media day and represent the kind of veteran core that sets the tone for everything.
Dawkins, for example, is a six-year senior with two degrees already and going for a third. Wheatley has been a turnover machine in the secondary, with nine takeaways so far. Allar is heading into year three as the starting quarterback with some of the cleanest stats in college football.
But it’s not just about experience. Franklin made it clear the talent pipeline is flowing stronger than ever.
“When it comes to player development, we expect to have anywhere between 10 and 12 guys drafted this year,” he said. “We’ve averaged over five draft picks per year in my 12 years at Penn State. That’s a stat we’re very, very proud of.”
He even took it back to 2016, the year Penn State won the Big Ten Championship. That season only produced one 2017 NFL Draft pick—Chris Godwin. Now? The expectations are higher, and so is the output.
Another sign of how loaded this team is? Franklin brought in eight guys from the transfer portal, but he stressed they’re not a program that relies heavily on it. “We’re not a big portal team,” he said. “We’ll go out and make some moves and make some adjustments to fill maybe a gap.”
That strategy is paying off. Instead of overhauling the roster, Penn State used the portal to plug specific needs—just like programs used to with junior colleges.
When asked if having all this talent adds pressure to win it all this year, Franklin welcomed the question.
“These are always the expectations at Penn State,” he said. “There’s a lot of people excited on a national level… but that hasn’t changed internally in our program.”
At the end of the day, Franklin knows preseason hype means nothing unless you back it up. “The only rankings that matter are the ones that happen at the end of the season,” he said.
So now it’s about handling business. And if Franklin’s confidence is any indicator, business might just be booming in Happy Valley this fall.
