Penn State Football's 5-0 Is Start 'Impactful.' Now the Hard Part

The Nittany Lions have achieved a milestone for Penn State football. Coach James Franklin wants his team to build upon it.

Penn State coach James Franklin greets fans in the student section before a Big Ten football game against Illinois at Beaver Stadium. / Dan Rainville / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The 2024 Penn State football team became the first in program history to reach a four-year milestone: The Nittany Lions improved to 5-0 for the fourth consecutive season with a win over UCLA. This marks the first time Penn State has achieved that four-year feat in its 137-year history. Now comes the hard part: turning another early win streak into a College Football Playoff berth.

No. 4 Penn State takes its next major step in that direction Saturday at USC for its first BIg Ten road game of the season. No other FBS program has gone 5-0 over the past four seasons. Penn State coach James Franklin called that "impactful" as the Nittany Lions seek to build an annual contender.

"When you are able to say you're the only team in the country that has started 5-0 four straight years, when you're able to say those types of things, to me that's impactful," Franklin said. "I want the staff to understand that, and I want the players to understand that. Consistency is something that everybody is working for and is hard to do. I think this week was a really good example of that.

"When you're also able to say that not only did you do something that you're the only team in college football that's done that, but you are also able to say it's the first time in Penn State history that that's happened, those are things that the players should be proud of. They've done that. The staff has done that. The coaches, the assistants, thet equipment people, everybody. They've done that."

Now, Penn State must build on that start to make the College Football Playoff bid. Penn State closed the past two regular seasons with 4-2 records, losing to Ohio State and Michigan each year and missing the four-team playoff. The Nittany Lions got particularly off track in 2021, finishing that regular season 2-5.

Penn State this week enters a challenging four-game stretch that includes road trips to USC and Wisconsin and home dates with Ohio State and Washington. The Nittany Lions will define their season during that run.

"It's continuing to do the things that we have to do each week as the schedule gets more and more difficult," Franklin said. "We play in one of the best conferences in all of college football, which is going to create challenges. I think we have three teams right now ranked in the top four [Ohio State, Oregon and Penn State]. That's what comes with that. You embrace what comes with playing one of
the best conferences in all of college football, and those challenges come with it.

"So we've got to do the things that we've done to this point to get us to be 5-0. That's something that we can control. We've got to make sure that we're doing it for the long haul, and that's as the schedule goes on and as the opponents get more and more challenging and as you have bumps and bruises and things like that that affect depth, you've got to find solutions to give yourself the best chance to be successful."

Still, Franklin said, he wants the team to enjoy the run while it's happening.

"I think there's a time and a place after the game to recognize all the hard work that's gone into us being 1-0 that week and however many 1-0s we've been able to stack and address that and recognize that," Franklin said. "To be able to recognize a guy like Liam Clifford, first career 100-yard game [against UCLA.] To be able to recognize a guy like Tyler Warren, who breaks the touchdown record at the tight end position. Or whether it's [kicker Ryan] Barker going in and making those field goals, which were awesome to see go through the uprights. You want to recognize people's hard work and then move on to the next task and the next goal and the next objective.

"That's what we try to do. To me there should be some confidence that comes from those things, which is you can take into the next week and then there's also a ton of things that we got to get corrected. I think that's part of my job after the game is to be able to show them these things, recognize it because the next day we're going to come in and watch the film, and we're going to spend the majority of our time on what? Correcting the mistakes and the things that we did
wrong. So we want to make sure that there's balance, right?"

Penn State visits USC at 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. CBS will televise.

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