COURTESY OF PENN STATE ATHLETIC MEDIA RELATIONS DEPARTMENT
Opening Statement:
Like always, I want to thank you guys, and I hope you guys know that we mean that. The coverage that you guys give us is fair. There's obviously a big appetite in this region for Penn State football, so you guys do a great job of serving that community, so we really appreciate that.
Obviously we've had some staff changes, which has probably been the biggest story since the last time we've spoke, and that's probably the hard part. I view my job as the head coach is to serve our players and serve the staff and helping everybody achieve their dreams, whether that is to graduate, whether that is to get a job on Wall Street, whether that is to go to the NFL, a combination of those things. Whether that's guys being able to have the opportunity to grow professionally, and it's pretty cool when you look at it, obviously it's challenging, and I'm not saying I love it, but also when it's cool when you look at -- we've had two assistants leave to become head coaches. We've had two assistants leave to be offensive coordinators, one assistant now at the NFL in Sean [Spencer].
As you guys know, Sean was kind of one of the few guys left that's been with me from the beginning, so for me and Brent [Pry], you're talking about kind of our road dog for 10 years. We've been together for a long time. Sean was great, very up front about the whole situation, and obviously being from the region and his wife being from New York, it just made sense.
And then one of our -- even one of our administrators leaving football operations and going on to be an associate AD, on that path.
Obviously it does create challenges, but I do think it's a really good example of a healthy program that people have seen the success that we've had and kind of want to steal bits and pieces of it.
It's a win-win for everybody. The thing we have to do a great job, obviously, is having a great list of people that we are going to be able to hire so that every change -- what I try to explain to the players, whether it's this or anything else in life, every change that happens is an opportunity. It's an opportunity hopefully for us to be able to hire someone with a similar skill set to keep things the same, and in some areas maybe even be able to upgrade, which is what we're always trying to do.
So that's probably the biggest news since I think the last time we talked, probably the biggest changes.
Today was a pretty mellow day when it comes to signings because we signed our entire class in the first signing period. Today we celebrated a lot of the PROs, what we call them, the PROs, the preferred run-on candidates, and it was great for those guys. It's an exciting time for those guys. We've got a number of guys that turned down scholarships to come to Penn State in this role, so that was cool, and then we were able to do a call-in with some of the top underclassmen in the country, as well. So that was good.
And then probably the last thing I'd say to you and then I'll open it up to questions is obviously we're spending a lot of time right now with the offense and talking about what they did at Minnesota, talking about what we have done, and then not only merging but also saying, okay, this is how we did it at Penn State, and this is how we did it at Minnesota, and not necessarily just merging, but also saying what's in Penn State's best interest moving forward.