STATE COLLEGE
The player everybody should have been watching on this picturesque Saturday, the one who may mean most to Penn State’s fortunes in the fall, is the player anybody in Scranton could have watched, up close, on any given fall Saturday over the last two seasons.
For sure this time, the eyes were on him in the Blue-White Game like they never have been before, though. Not during his unheralded and injury-riddled high school days in North Carolina. Not even as the freakish athlete guiding Lackawanna College the last two seasons.
Paris Palmer did not play like the savior of Penn State’s offensive line Saturday. Not even close. But if he becomes the player Penn State believes he can be, it makes all the sense in the world that he can be the missing piece in 2015, the guy that completes a first-team unit that has been battered and bruised on the field and off it since the start of 2014.
“When Paris came in, a 6-foot-8 guy, we were like, ‘Wow,’ ” Penn State guard Brendan Mahon said. “We are 6-4, and he just towered over all of us. I can definitely tell he played at a college level before.”
On the list of predictable-but-useless things football fans do, “Take the spring game too seriously” is right up there with the assumption the backup quarterback will always make things better.
So, here’s guessing the fact that Christian Hackenberg was sacked five times — that’s 47 since the beginning of the 2014 season, for anyone counting — is going to be a major talking point after the Blue team’s lackluster 17-7 win over the White. The Blue team, after all, consisted of Penn State’s starters. And if Penn State’s
new and improved starting offensive line struggles with its backup defensive line ...
The storyline practically writes itself, doesn’t it?
But it’s early.
Too early to make judgements.
Too early to ignore some of the positive strides the suspected starting unit did up front and just focus on the sacks. Because on Akeel Lynch’s 22-yard touchdown run on the game’s opening drive, it was Palmer who cast a defender aside, broke to the second level and pushed another inside so Lynch could break out.
But longtime backup defensive end Evan Schwan beat him twice for sacks, and it’s likely that a missed assignment by Palmer enabled Curtis Cothran to register another, unabated.
It’s easy to look at last season and anticipate the worst, though. And it’s easy to look at Palmer’s uneven performance Saturday and expect he can’t change anything.
Look at it realistically, though, and it’s easy to understand that what you got was probably what you should have expected.
Just because he came from the same NJCAA program that gave the world Bryant McKinnie all those years ago doesn’t mean Palmer is Bryant McKinnie right now. The important thing is that, from top to bottom, most everyone on Penn State’s offense has indicated Palmer is putting in the work to be as good as he can be.
“Paris, he worked extremely hard in the winter workouts, and that’s one of the things that really stood out to me: how much he cared,” Hackenberg said. “He has a lot of work to do, a lot of catching up to do. But he’s the type of kid that, I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to do so. We’re going to continue to work with him, to continue to stay on him, and work with him to be the best player he can be. Because he has a ton of talent.”
A ton of talent means nothing without a lot of work, and nobody knows that as well as Penn State’s offensive linemen. They took a beating from everyone last year — opponents, the press, even a coaching staff that never pulled any bones about how much improvement they needed to see to just become adequate last season.
And this isn’t a group of walk-ons pulled off the intramural fields. Donovan Smith, Angelo Mangiro, Mahon and Andrew Nelson were all highly recruited prospects.
For most of the first half, when they were all on the field together, the center Mangiro looked more in sync with his guards, Mahon and Brian Gaia. And the guards looked to be in better synch with right tackle Andrew Nelson than they were a year ago. That’s not by accident. That comes through time.
Is it a finished product yet? No. Like Palmer, it’s not close to finished. That said, it’s clearly on its way.
Can Palmer join them? That’s the question. For Penn State, it’s an important one. Maybe, the most important one.
The answer just didn’t come Saturday in a scrimmage.
“From what I saw in the beginning of the spring to what I saw today is night and day how much he improved,” Schwan said.
The next four months of improvement are going to tell how much Paris Palmer will mean to Penn State.
It’s not unfair to say how good Penn State’s offense will be depends on them.
(Collins covers Penn State for Times-Shamrock. Follow him on Twitter @psubst)