Pat Kraft talks NIL progress, assistant coach retention, Beaver Stadium and more
Pat Kraft has been at Penn State for less than a year, but has already undertaken the biggest item on the athletic department’s plate.
Kraft, the Penn State athletic director, said he and the rest of the department are “close” on recommendations for what to do with Beaver Stadium.
“We’re close,” he said. “We had a study that was done. ... There were 19 studies done on the stadium and nothing was done. In the past eight or nine years there were 19 studies done on Beaver Stadium. So it’s not for a lack of information. I feel very comfortable ... that we will have a recommendation to (Penn State President) Neeli (Bendapudi) and the board as to what direction we need to move in. So I do think it’s coming.”
The options in the past have included building a new stadium or renovating the structure.
Building a new stadium could be cost prohibitive for the department, however, and Kraft seemed to indicate that the preference would be to keep Beaver Stadium and fix it rather than go through the process of building a new stadium.
“We are very proud of having 107,000 and over 100,000 fans,” Kraft said. “No one is building a 100,000 seat stadium. That’s important to us. That’s an important piece to who we are.”
There remains one issue for the stadium that is looming in the not too distant future.
The College Football Playoff is set to expand to 12 teams in the 2024 season, putting the Nittany Lions in position to make repeated appearances given their status as a team just below the elite under head coach James Franklin.
That would give them an opportunity to potentially host playoff games with seeds five through eight hosting first round matchups against the lowest four seeds.
The cold weather in State College in December could complicate that — especially with issues when it comes to pipes freezing. Kraft said that would not be an issue and the athletic department would find a way to host a playoff game no matter what it had to do.
“Make no bones about it, if we had to play a playoff game in three weeks, we’d play a playoff game in here,” Kraft said with a smile. “I don’t care what it would take. We’ll flush the toilets and keep the water running for a month before.”
Progress with name, image and likeness
When Kraft originally took over as the school’s athletic director, he cited NIL as an area where he wanted to make progress. After taking time to make changes and cultivate the outside interests necessary, Kraft says it’s no longer something that keeps him up at night.
“I felt like we were really behind from a total NIL perspective,” Kraft said. “... Infrastructure, I think we’re in a really good spot. We’re selling all of our athletes’ jerseys, which is an important piece. ... We’ve now got all the back end support for our athletes.”
The progress the department has made doesn’t mean it’s going to be making promises to recruits that they’ll receive certain amounts of money.
Kraft said that isn’t going to be how the program handles NIL.
“They’re throwing half a million dollars or $700,000 if you come to (a) school,” he said. “We’re just not going to do that. That’s just not how it works. What you will see is a lot of our athletes have had a lot of success in that space.”
One of the benefits the football program has seen with regard to NIL and other issues is less of a need for Franklin to be involved with those processes.
Franklin said Kraft’s presence has allowed him to take a step back on those issues.
“Me and (chief of staff) Kevin Threlkel, as you know is my kind of right hand man, we gotta change our approach because we’re wasting time in meetings,” Franklin said. “We’ll go to them a lot of times with things that we think we need to do. ... We don’t really need to do that (with Pat).”
Assistant coach retention
In the past, Penn State has lost some of its football assistants to lateral jobs, but that does not seem like it will be the case any longer. Kraft said the team’s assistant coach salary pool remains in the top three and should allow the program to compete in that regard when it wants to.
“I will always be committed to keeping our staff together no matter what,” Kraft said. “There just does, like the stadium, there comes a threshold where you’re like, ‘do we need to invest at that point or do we feel we’ve got to move in a different direction,’ but that will always be in concert with James.”
One of those assistants that may have been in position to leave is defensive coordinator Manny Diaz. He has been connected to multiple head coach openings, but said he’s currently fully focused on the Rose Bowl and the 2023 season.
While he added that he wants to be a head coach again, Diaz said he’ll be specific about that opportunity the next time it comes around.
“I have a great job,” Diaz said. “It would take an amazingly great job to leave a great job. ... Second time around I think you’re a little wiser in the opportunity. You don’t just let the opportunity choose you, I think you choose the opportunity a little differently.”
Assistant retention was not just a key focus for the football program, however, as Kraft said he wants to be able to do the same to compete in all sports.
That includes men’s basketball, where head coach Micah Shrewsberry has the program in good position after signing two of the best recruiting classes in program history and leading the team to a 7-3 start this season — including an upset over Illinois on the road.
Kraft said the athletic department has what it takes to retain Shrewsberry financially, but said there’s more at play than just paying the head coach.
“Micah is a great coach,” he said. “Micah is a really, really, really good coach. ... It’s not just about paying the coach, and the great coaches know that. It’s about keeping the staff, being able to hire staff if you lose staff, which is part of the process. It’s also about putting the infrastructure behind them to be successful. ... That infrastructure, which I think has lacked for a lot of our sports, is where I think we have to invest in now. We started already doing that.”
Quick Hitters
- Franklin said the team hopes to have running back Keyvone Lee and offensive tackles Olu Fashanu and Caedan Wallace for the Rose Bowl.
- No players opted out during Friday’s media availability after Joey Porter Jr. did so in early December.
- None of the draft eligible players with eligibility remaining announced whether or not they would leave the program after this season.
