Penn State Nittany Lions

Penn State OL could be shuffled, but Franklin says options limited

Published Sep. 9, 2015 6:22 p.m. ET

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Marcus Hartman

Penn State football coach James Franklin said in the immediate aftermath of his team's 27-10 loss to Temple there were not a lot of options as far as changing up the starting offensive line that was charged with 10 sacks on the afternoon.

Tuesday when he had his weekly meeting with reporters in State College, he sounded a bit more open to the possibility -- but not much.

"Yeah, I don't know if you're necessarily going to see a bunch of new starters," Franklin said. "I think you're going to possibly see some guys move around, things like that."

He mentioned Wendy Laurent, a junior listed as the backup to senior center Angelo Mangiro, and Chance Sorrell, a redshirt freshman listed as the backup to left tackle Paris Palmer, as potential players who could move into the lineup somewhere but suggested changing some things within the starting lineup that also includes guards Brendan Mahon and Brian Gaia and right tackle Andrew Nelson was more likely.

"We had a walk-through on Sunday, we gotta go out and practice on Tuesday through Friday and determine some of those things," Franklin said. "Obviously we spent a lot of time in the offseason trying to figure out who our best five were going to be. We had some question marks. Again, felt like we would play better than we did on Saturday, but we're going to have to figure that out throughout this week."

The coach confirmed problems were both related to mental and physical mistakes.

"I think it was probably a little bit of both," Franklin said. "We had some communication issues from the sideline with signaling, plays coming in, that happened a few times. We had some situations where I think, again, in practice, guys had been taking control and being able to help some inexperienced players by telling them what to do, and I think we got into the game and things started flying around and that communication stopped. So I think that's one of the things that we gotta continue to work on and continue to stress because you guys have heard me say this before. A lot of times on offense and defense, you can be wrong as long as everybody is wrong together, and we're all on the same page, and that didn't happen at times on Saturday."

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