How Penn State’s streak of ultra-athletic skill players has raised the program’s bar (2024)

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Sean Clifford likes to pull up one of the homemade videos sometimes, a short clip of Saquon Barkley power cleaning 405 pounds. Clifford wants to show it because it’s an astounding feat and a program record, but also because he sees himself in the background.

“I’m the little freshman in the corner, and my jaw is dropped,” Clifford says. “And he did things like that all the time.”

Clifford, now the redshirt sophom*ore starting quarterback for No. 8 Penn State, has had a front-row seat to a number of naturally freakishly athletic football players, whom he has proceeded to watch get even more freakishly athletic during their time in State College. If it seems like Penn State always has dynamic playmakers — particularly at the offensive skill positions — it’s because it’s true. Saquon Barkley. Chris Godwin. DaeSean Hamilton. Mike Gesicki. Miles Sanders. Those are just some of the former Nittany Lions who grew stronger, faster and more agile in this weight room, many of whom have gone on to separate themselves as physical marvels even among the pros. Guys like Noah Cain, K.J. Hamler and Pat Freiermuth are doing it now for the 2019 team.

And the most impressive part is they’re coming in stronger, faster and more agile than ever before. So the ceiling for what they can accomplish at Penn State, both individually and as a team, has risen. It has allowed the Nittany Lions to become a consistent threat to win the Big Ten, as one of the few teams that can actually hope to regularly challenge Ohio State in the last five or so years. Becoming a program that prizes speed and power and plays one off the other will do that.

“The talent — just the pure talent — that we have now is different,” Clifford says. “I’m not saying we weren’t talented before, but when you get higher-rated guys … when you get bigger, stronger, faster guys and put them into the program Penn State has now with the coaching staff we have, with the strength staff we have, you combine all that and build elite teams.

“We’re right there on the brink of it.”

Dwight Galt, the assistant athletic director in charge of performance enhancement, keeps track of all-time program records: shuttle speed, vertical jump, squats, bench presses, power cleans and the like. They’re sorted by position and hung by magnets on the wall in the weight room.

Galt snapped a photo of the boards a couple of months ago with a lot of empty spaces. Those were spots where old records had been. Current players on the roster had broken them, and their magnets needed to go up. A lot of magnets needed to go up.

Galt, who has worked with head coach James Franklin continuously for more than a decade dating back to their time at Maryland, has joked that even though the coaching staff thanks him for the work he and his staff do to build their players, he should be thanking them for bringing in better and better athletes as the years have passed.

“I’ve always had an obsession with speed, strength and power, that’s why I’m a strength coach,” Galt says. “When you get guys who come in and do things you only ever rarely see, it’s really cool.”

When freshmen arrive at Penn State, the strength staff puts them through a few tests. They want baseline numbers so they can track growth. They do a rep test for bench press as well as the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, broad jump, triple broad jump and pro agility. Galt calls them their performance metrics.

“We want to see where they are athletically,” Galt says. “We watch them run and do the movements. We do Bod Pod to see where their body fat is, which is obviously really important. We also do some applied sports science things with them like force plate testing. That can calculate the production of force as your feet leave (the plate) and how long you’re in the air before your feet land back on it. Through algorithms, you can figure out how explosive you are.”

The staff also tests functional movement, to examine and measure flexibility and tightness. They test for hamstring strength and deficiencies from the left to the right leg. Hamstring strength, Galt says, impacts speed — and Penn State is a speed program.

“I like to leave no stone unturned with what we can do to establish speed improvements with our guys and how fast they come in,” Galt says.

One of the most significant changes in Galt’s field over the past 20 years is that high school players are getting more and more experience with strength training. Years ago, he would have to teach incoming freshmen how to squat. Now, it’s just about tweaking existing form. High school coaches “have given us a better product,” Galt says, “and we’re giving the NFL a better product.”

Penn State’s recruiting classes have gotten better and better the longer Franklin has been at the helm and the further the program has gotten from its early decade NCAA sanctions. According to the 247Sports Composite, Penn State’s 2016 class ranked No. 20 in the nation. Its 2018 class ranked sixth, led by three five-star recruits in Micah Parsons, Justin Shorter and Ricky Slade. Its 2019 class, ranked 12th, had one five-star (Brandon Smith) along with four-stars who have already made a significant impact as true freshmen, such as running backs Cain and Devyn Ford.

Understandably, bringing in more elite recruits impacts the baseline testing.

“(The numbers) are a lot stronger on the front end, which is good and bad,” Galt says. “Sometimes when you get the guys that are really athletic, just genetically, it’s really hard to get them like significantly more because they’re already at such a high level. Like, Micah Parsons came in, and he ran a 4.56 when he got here.”

After four months of training, the linebacker ran a 4.52, and Galt was ecstatic. Four hundredths of a second was encouraging for an athlete who came in with so much natural ability. Now, less than two years later, Parsons is at a 4.43. “If you can get a tenth with guys like that, that’s pretty good,” Galt says. “Regular guys, normal athletes, a lot of times we’ll get two tenths.”

Redshirt senior offensive lineman Michal Menet would consider himself a normal athlete, and he says he’s been able to put on weight while keeping his shuttle time and 40 time basically the same. Keeping his quickness and ability to move on his feet was important to Menet and the strength staff.

Menet says the competitive nature of the weight room feeds into everyone’s growth. Those records are on the wall, staring at everyone all the time. Players don’t just want to beat their personal bests but also the program’s. Menet has lifted more weight each time the staff has tested him on all the big lifts. (Testing is done twice a year.)

He’s seen some of the freak athletes, too. He highlights Miles Sanders in particular, as does Galt. Sanders, like Barkley before him, put in a ton of time in the weight room to build himself into even more of a marvel. And then recruits behind both players could see the fruits of that work when they watch them on Sundays.

“They see these great athletes coming in and then leaving even better than when they got here,” Menet says. “Miles is a really good example. He was an incredible athlete when he got here, but when he left he was nowhere close to where he was. There was that much growth from him. It definitely helps to see, as a recruit, really high-caliber players playing for a program like that. It shows potential and it shows that the strength staff knows what they’re doing.”

This week, Clifford passed along a new nugget of information: K.J. Hamler had run a 4.27 40 this offseason. He said he saw him run it and wasn’t surprised by it.

“I’ve been throwing to him for two years now,” Clifford says. “When you see him run go-balls and deeper routes, you see that speed. When he ran the 4.2, obviously, it’s very impressive — I’m not knocking that at all — but at the same time I kind of saw it coming.”

Hamler’s development is particularly interesting because the receiver was still rehabbing a leg injury when he first got to State College. For a while, he was only really able to do heavy lifting with his upper body, which has paid great dividends for him as a blocker.

Hamler keeps in touch with DaeSean Hamilton and says he watches him play for the Denver Broncos on Sundays and thinks, He looks way faster, way quicker than last time I saw him here. So he calls Hamilton and asks for tips, such as specific drills and plans for postpractice and postgame recovery.

“I’m like, man, how’d you get so fast?” Hamler says. “I ask a lot of the NFL guys who went here what’s the biggest part, and they always say make sure you take care of your body every day. I try to mimic what they do.”

Some of the tips he’s gotten from Hamilton and other alums like Trace McSorley, Gesicki and Barkley are little things, like the importance of bands for stretching and working on hip mobility. Hamler has learned that paying attention to some of your smallest muscles can make a big difference. So, he’s tried to add to his personal routine in addition to what the strength staff asks him to do.

The extra work is particularly important because, by design, there’s a great deal of weight training, even in-season. The strength staff still wants its players to get stronger and bigger. Those who play in games still get two days of strength training per week; those who aren’t playing get three. Workouts are shorter than the offseason, of course, but they’re still aggressive.

“They’re getting stronger,” says wide receivers coach Gerad Parker. “Usually, you’d think there would be a fall-off. But there’s really not a fall-off of strength. Our young guys are gaining weight. When you get to bowl practice and spring ball, you’ve already got a kid that’s developed and growing instead of trying to start over in January.”

Galt and Parker also believe it’s why the team is as healthy as it is in mid-November. Galt says the programs that cut back too much in-season tend to lose power and leverage on the field in stretch-run games.

Each step of this process builds better athletes and a stronger team, with the goal of winning more and more games. Clifford thinks that games like Saturday’s against No. 2 Ohio State can act as measuring-stick moments, with Penn State knocking on the door of the sport’s uppermost echelon: the annual College Football Playoff contenders.

What the Nittany Lions’ success both on the field and in the weight room during Franklin’s tenure has done is continue to open the door to more talented and more athletic prospects. He and his staff can show they can take talented football players and mold their bodies into NFL-ready stars. Every head-turning number put up attracts more talent who can potentially be the next record-breaker.

“I’m respectful of everywhere I’ve worked,” says Parker. “But at the same time, of course, being here you do feel like every film you watch or anybody that fits our mold of recruiting, you feel like you have a legit shot to really recruit the best players in the country.”

Barkley understands this. He also understands his own role in making Penn State more attractive to recruits who followed him. The weight room was a special place to him, the home of what Galt calls an “explosion” once Barkley’s hard work led to dramatic gains, and Barkley understands the pull of a place like that and the impact Galt and associate director of performance enhancement Chuck Losey make.

“They don’t just train you to be average,” Barkley says. “You go there to be an elite athlete. As you can see with K.J., with Yetur (Gross-Matos), with Rob Windsor — all those guys playing at a high level, you can see how it continues to translate.

“It doesn’t hurt when you go into the locker room and you see that huge weight room. You look at the boards and you can set goals and records to try to beat.”

— Dan Duggan in New York contributed reporting.

(Top photo of K.J. Hamler: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)