STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- In the green room at AT&T Stadium as draft hopefuls waited to become NFL draft picks while their nervous yet excited families tried to wish away the waiting away, James Franklin saw Saquon Barkley’s football journey come full circle.
“To be there for that moment and then to kind of think back on all the way back to the recruiting process and showing up to the high school and talking to guidance counselors and high school coaches and to be sitting in Saquon’s living room and see that and then the whole journey when he was at Penn State to that moment was pretty powerful,” Franklin said this week. “He made the comment and said he couldn’t hug everybody, they’re going to need me to get up there. I said, ‘Just so we’re clear: You’re hugging me.’ I’m sitting right next to mom and dad and I’m like I’m getting a hug because you know I’m an emotional guy and I’m probably going to start crying anyway so you’re hugging me.”
As Barkley set off for the NFL, shattering rookie jersey sales records in the process, Penn State is left to find his replacement. To be fair, there won’t be any replacing No. 26. -- certainly not by one player. The jump cut, the hurdle, the spin move and the charisma don’t get repackaged and passed onto into someone else.
Replacing Barkley is impossible for this team or any other, but what he did for Penn State football, both the players who remain and those who still haven’t arrived on campus, will be a small piece of the story this fall.
There’s the tireless work ethic that returning teammates saw firsthand as Barkley was Hulk-like in the weight room while many others with his skills and abilities could’ve been complacent. Teammates were able to take note of that and apply that same mindset to their training.
“When your best player is one of your better workers and is high production and low maintenance it kind of sets the tone for the whole organization,” Franklin said. “That’s where guys leave a program and they’re legends. To me that’s what Saquon is. Saquon is a legend because obviously he’s a talented player, but I believe in State College he’s a legend because of how he treated people.”
There are lessons to be learned from both Barkley the football player and Barkley the person. As his success skyrocketed and he became the face of the program teammates and coaches raved about how his sincerity and his work ethic didn’t disappear. ‘That’s just Saquon’ became a common phrase uttered by those around the Lasch Football Building and in the community.
But, Barkley’s impact extends well beyond those who are already on campus. The success Barkley had on the field, both right away as a true freshman and during the following two seasons, helped Penn State garner national attention. That's made recruiting conversations a little easier for the coaching staff.
“Anytime you have a recognizable name, a face, a figure, whatever it may be it automatically gets you in the door with kids,” running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider said. “It makes conversations easy. ‘Coach, tell me about this kid? What made him so successful?’ Well, he worked, the offense was good, he was coached every day. Things like that. It just makes it easier because now, OK, if they can do it for him, they can do it for me.”
While nobody will be Barkley, redshirt freshman safety Jonathan Sutherland will have the honor of running out of the tunnel and seeing the majority of Beaver Stadium sporting his jersey number, or rather the No. 26 that was made popular by Barkley.
The Penn State running backs will see their stats compared to where the ground game was one, two and three years prior all while trying to make a name for themselves at a place where Barkley’s shadow is gigantic.
Still, as one of the “culture drivers” of the program – the term Franklin likes to call people who help set the tone like Barkley – Penn State is in a much better place and arrived so more quickly than anyone could’ve imagined in part because of what one player helped this team achieve.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of residual effects in our program from all those perspectives with him,” Franklin said. “I think we got a hungry team and I actually think Saquon’s experience has probably made a lot of our team hungrier because it’s someone that they know and someone that they’ve seen in our program you know, who was able to kind of chase all of his dreams at the highest level. I think it’s a motivator for our guys.”
