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James Franklin calls for enhancements to State College airport as Penn State prepares for long trip to USC
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James Franklin is not happy with his team’s new B1G travel schedule.
With the conference adding schools on the West Coast like USC and UCLA, schools in the Northeast like Penn State now have lengthy travel plans. The roughly 2,700-mile flight to Los Angeles is bad enough, but the Nittany Lions will also have to take a 100-mile bus ride to another airport.
State College, where Penn State is located, has an airport, but it is not large enough to accommodate a cross-country flight. The team will be forced to bus to Harrisburg where they will then head to LA.
“Not only are we one of the most northeast schools, but based on runway length, size of plane, weight of plane, fuel on plane, we can’t get out of here unless we would stop for fuel,” Franklin explained in his Monday press conference, via FootballScoop. “So with that, we’ve got to fly out of Harrisburg.”
Franklin mentioned that his team would leave a day earlier to help mitigate the travel.
To make travel easier in the future, Franklin wants the airport in State College to be upgraded.
“To me, that’s one of the things I think we have to discuss is increasing the size of the runway here and the size of the airport, for a lot of reasons… for the university, for the community, for businesses, for the athletic department, and for us now that we’ve decided to make this move as a Big Ten,” Franklin said. “To me, that’s something that we need to do for a lot of different reasons.”
Fellow B1G member Ohio State is also traveling to the West Coast this weekend, but the Buckeyes don’t have to travel to an airport an hour away from campus as the Nittany Lions do.
Franklin’s squad is slated to kick off against the USC Trojans on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET.
Bryce Lazenby covers college football for Saturday Tradition. A Nashville native, his previous stops include FanSided, Dimers, and The Leaf-Chronicle.