If Penn State is ever to gain equal footing with Ohio State and Michigan, the Nittany Lions need to get tough.

Head coach James Franklin, the man with the plan for reaching elite status, admitted as much after the Lions’ 38-3 victory over Maryland to close regular-season play.

Though not addressing a specific question about toughness, his words made his vision of the future clear.

“That’s the next step for us … to play well up front with the O-line and D-line against whoever we play,” he said. “We need to be able to do that week in and week out against whoever we play.”

Amen, Coach. Amen.

It’s time

Is it possible? Can Franklin build a squad with the lunch-pail, on-the-field toughness of Michigan and the mental toughness of Ohio State? Can the Lions be done with hangover losses to a solid but inferior Michigan State program?

The answers better be yes. It’s time.

In 2019, Franklin will enter his sixth season leading the Lions. All the players will be his recruits. Any excuses about lingering effects from the sanctions period need to be left in the past. Penn State is riding a wave of positive momentum and needs to stay on it.

There have been good signs this year, plenty of them:

  • The defense got better and better as the year went on. True freshman LB Micah Parsons got comfortable in the latter part of the season, playing downhill after starting the season confused and on his heels. DE Yetur Gross-Matos blossomed in the second half. As a whole, the defense went from looking shaky and timid early on to leading the Big Ten in sacks and tackles for loss.
  • With a one-game exception, the starting offensive line played together all season. If no one leaves early for the NFL Draft, they’re all coming back. With the Citrus Bowl remaining, the running game is averaging 208.5 ypg and 5.2 ypc — both Franklin Era bests. How’s this for steady progress?

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  • In all came together on Senior Day against Maryland. The Lions ran for 310 yards and held the Terps — a team coming off back-to-back games of 300-plus rushing yards and 500-plus total yards — to 74 yards on the ground and 259 overall.

Penn State gets a final chance to gauge its toughness against Kentucky in the Citrus Bowl (1 p.m., Jan. 1, ABC). The Wildcats (9-3), having their best season in decades, will bring a Michigan-type approach. They play stout defense, led by projected first-round NFL pick Josh Allen. They grind on offense with workhorse four-year 1,000-yard rusher Benny Snell. No, they don’t have the across-the-formation power of Michigan’s roster, but the Wildcats will bring all they got.

The Lions can prove something, perhaps most importantly to themselves, by out-muscling the Wildcats convincingly.

When Trace is gone …

It’s been so much fun, especially those two years when Franklin paired QB Trace McSorley and RB Saquon Barkley with former offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead. They put Penn State back on the map with a wide-open, multi-faceted, quick-strike offense that covered up shoddy defense and mediocre-to-bad offensive line play.

Franklin put the cart ahead of the horse and got away with it. Penn State never would have risen that far that fast taking the Jim Harbaugh approach.

But times are changing.

When the Lions open next season (vs. Idaho, Aug. 31), the new starting QB shouldn’t have to worry about matching McSorley’s heroics. The line should dictate play. Penn State should be able to throw when it wants to, not because it has to. I’m not advocating for abandoning the Moorhead-style approach, only that a more mature Penn State program can pick its spots. Ferraris are not for everyday use. In Big Ten country, sometimes a 4-wheel-drive pickup with knobby tires and a plow on the front is more useful.

In human form, those plows go about 6-4 and 320 pounds on average, with names like McGovern, Menet, Gozalez, Bates and Fries. By next fall, they should be stronger and more powerful, because …

PSU’s strength coach is the real deal

As roarlionsroar.com declared in the wake of the NFL Draft Combine roughly nine months ago: Penn State’s strength coach has broken the combine. Dwight Galt went to Vanderbilt with Franklin and followed him to State College. Franklin calls Galt “probably the most important hire we’ve made.”

Admittedly, Barkley makes everyone around him look good. And strength coaches are often over-hyped. Two things though:

  1. PSU’s dominance of the 2018 Combine went way deeper than Barkley. Click the link (if you didn’t above) and read for yourself.
  2. Penn State had six players drafted this year. But 11 ex-Nittany Lions are rookies in the NFL right now, seven on active rosters, one on IR after making a 53-man roster, and three on practice squads. That speaks to players who continue to grow, rather than plateau.

Galt’s work will really be on display if the defensive front seven continues its progress and becomes dominant next season. Most of the group is very young. These young men, big and strong as they be when the arrive, are still developing. Parsons, with a team-leading 69 tackles, more than held his own this season. But so much more is possible for a guy with a Barkley-like desire to succeed.

More big-time recruits coming

This year, Penn State finally got on the same computer screen with Ohio State in recruiting. Before 2018, one had to page down — usually more than once — to find the Lions. Reeling in a school-record three 5-star recruits, Franklin put together the country’s sixth best class this past season.

Ohio State has ranked better than sixth three years running and hasn’t been outside the top 10 since 2010. The Buckeyes won’t be going away, even with some turmoil, a coaching transition and a 5,500-fan drop in home attendance. At best, fans of other teams can hope for a slight slip that creates an opening.

Franklin started a lap down when he arrived. In its biggest games, the PSU program has been sending mostly 3-star squads into 4- and 5-star Big Ten brawls for most of the past two decades.

But not any more. The 2019 PSU class currently ranks 14th, five spots back of OSU. Both classes would rank higher if they were bigger; the quality is there. Franklin will bring in his fifth 5-star player since 2016 in linebacker Brandon Smith. More importantly, the Lions will welcome only one 3-star or lower player among the class that stands at 16 members as the ides of December approach.

At long last, the Lions are past the point of taking guys just to fill spots. For a team returning about 80 percent of its two-deep depth chart, 16 players is plenty. They may sign a few more before all is said and done, but they don’t need to.

Franklin is a relentless pitchman. And he’s got product. He’s selling Galt’s NFL-proven training regimen, #107Kstrong, fun, family, whiteouts. He’s selling parents along with the teenagers, and he’s good at it. He pays homage to Penn State history and traditions, mining deep for the gold that became ever more rare — to be honest — since the turn of the century.

Before 2018, Penn State hadn’t had a top 10 class since 2006. In four of Joe Paterno’s final seven years, the Lions’ class ranked 30th or worse. There were no 5-star recruits between 2006 and Christian Hackenberg in 2013.

Franklin has made up ground like Dave Wottle in the 800-meter final of the 1972 Olympics. In the three years before he arrived, the sanctions-hampered classes ranked 31st, 47th and 33rd in Bill O’Brien’s final year. Franklin’s first class ranked 24th nationally and third in the B1G despite having only five 4-star guys among its 25 members. Assuming no dramatic changes when the 2019 classes become official, the Lions will have been top 3 in the B1G — and above MSU — every year but one (2016, 4th) under Franklin.

The final push

Franklin finally has Penn State on the same plane athletically with the other kingpins of the conference. More and more, it’s going to be a fair fight. There most definitely is a “Big Three” in the conference, and Penn State most definitely is part of it.

Still, the Lions will remain a B1G East underdog until they prove otherwise on the field. You have to knockout the champ. Then keep the other contenders at bay. Hangover losses to Michigan State can’t be acceptable. It’s going to take a tougher, more well-rounded brand of football than Franklin’s squads have yet played.

Like the start of a Galt-led training session, the really hard work is just beginning.