Travel Plans for USC Illustrate One of Penn State’s Challenges in the New-Look Big Ten

There’s a navy blue truck with a Penn State logo and a “We Are” slogan written across its base pushing cargo across the country. Its body possesses equipment, a lot of it. It’ll take the truck over a day to get from State College to its final destination in Los Angeles, where the Nittany Lions will arrive after a grueling day of travel on Thursday, two days before playing USC.

The day will begin by bus from State College to Harrisburg and conclude by flight from Harrisburg to Los Angeles. It’s not an ideal situation for James Franklin and his team by any sense of the word, but one that characterizes the absurd nature of conference realignment to a tee: a small town team attempting to travel cross country to the big city.

The long trip centers around one substantial roadblock.

“We cannot fly out of State College,” Franklin said on Tuesday. “That was a big part of our discussions with the Big Ten when this thing got started, is, 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. So with that, we got to fly out of Harrisburg.”

It’s almost the opposite trip UCLA took this past weekend. The Bruins flew into State College on two smaller jets, but flew out of Harrisburg on one larger plane because the runway at State College Regional Airport isn’t able to support the weight of a departing aircraft loaded with an entire team and the fuel needed to make a cross-country trip, nor is it long enough to support larger, narrow-body aircrafts.

Franklin has long advocated for various improvements within his program and in Penn State’s athletic department. But this week brought one of his most exciting campaigns yet: a renovation of his local airport to better support the Nittany Lions in the expanded Big Ten and the coast-to-coast travel that comes with it.

“One of the things that 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.

The idea isn't a novel one. The master plan for State College Regional Airport shows a potential 1,600-foot extension of the current 6,701-foot long runway to accommodate larger aircrafts — though a specific project for the extension has not yet been brought forward and likely depends on the availability of funding. Another project could potentially resurface and strengthen the runway for heavier aircraft.

Penn State’s game against the Trojans is one of the team’s first true tests and one that should serve as an indicating factor that Franklin’s program is finally ready to make a run at the College Football Playoff and beyond. But instead of practicing on Thursday, which would typically be commonplace for the Nittany Lions, they’ll be traveling.

Franklin wasn’t left with much of a choice. It was either forgo a day of practice or spend the entire day before one of the most meaningful games of his season traveling, the second choice being the one the Bruins took.

“You're talking about adding another two hours to your trip on top of the flight, and I think the flight's already five-and-a-half hours or whatever it may be, so that's pretty much a full day,” Franklin said. So that's one of the big reasons for leaving Thursday.

The reality is that Penn State will make at least one West Coast trip in each of the next four seasons — at UCLA in 2025, at Washington in 2026, at Oregon in 2027 and at USC, again, in 2028. If changes aren’t made to State College Regional Airport and its runaway, things are not likely to change, travel wise, for the Nittany Lions.

“I feel good about our plan, but that's something that I think we're going to need to look at and address moving forward,” Franklin said. “Because it does change things for us, compared to a lot of other teams in our conference, that, even if they are northeast, they have an international airport and things like that within a short distance from campus. So, we’ve kind of gotten the double whammy. It's the distance as well as the airport.”

Geoff Rushton contributed to this report.

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