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Gerad Parker was ready to make an impression with an important prospect.
Four years before he would become Penn State’s wide receivers coach, Parker was an assistant at Purdue responsible for recruiting the Indianapolis area. And on this occasion, he made the trip to Decatur Central High School to talk to coach Justin Dixson about his quarterback.
A tall, athletic kid named Tommy Stevens.
“I go in to check in on Tommy and some other young guys,” Parker said Wednesday in his first media session since being hired last month. “Long story short, I walk into Coach Dixson’s class. Then he leaves me with his class for a second to go get one James Franklin and the rest of the staff that had showed up at the school to see Tommy.”
Just a bit of an uphill battle for Parker. Franklin and the Nittany Lions ultimately convinced Stevens to come to Happy Valley, where he is the early favorite to start this fall.
But that’s not the part of the story that stuck with Parker until he interviewed for a job with Franklin himself last month.
“So another girl in that class at the time walks up to me and asks if she can go to the restroom,” Parker said with a shake of his head. “As if I was the substitute teacher.
“So for the rest of our relationship I said you will never live this down. I became ‘the sub’ pretty quickly because coach Franklin came in.”
A few years later, Parker became the college football equivalent of a substitute teacher, closing out the 2016 season as Purdue’s interim head coach. His second game in that role came against Penn State.
Franklin remembered. And when it came time to look for a new receivers coach in January after the firing of David Corley, Parker got a recommendation from running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider, who worked with Parker in 2011 and 2012 when both were assistants at Marshall.
“(Parker’s) a guy I’ve been tracking for a long time — obviously when he was the interim head coach that we got a chance to watch and see up close,” Franklin said. “A lot of people that I trust and respect in the industry spoke highly of him. Obviously having guys on my staff that have worked with him before in Ja’Juan Seider, that carried a lot of weight for me as well.
“And he crushed the interview. He crushed the interview. So I feel really good about what we’ve done. I feel really good about where we’re going. And got a tremendous opportunity to make a significant impact.”
A tremendous opportunity and a tremendous challenge.
Parker inherits a wide receiver room long on talent but short on experience. The Lions came out on the other side of signing day with eight scholarship wide receivers on the roster, all of whom will have sophomore or freshman eligibility.
Two of them are true freshmen who won’t arrive until the summer. So when spring practice begins next month, he’ll have just six to go with a handful of walk-ons.
“I’ve never been around a room that young would be my first answer,” Parker said. “Secondly, it is exciting and challenging. Of course, would you rather walk into a senior-laden room and a proven room and all those things? Yeah. Anybody who says (otherwise) would be lying.
“But it is a challenge. You kind of like the youth that this room that has also bonded with talent. It’s a youthful room — which is always tricky to find leadership in a youthful room — but also it’s very gifted.”
Parker will first have to build up the confidence of a unit that dropped passes as much as any power five team in the country, according to stats kept by Pro Football Focus.
“You can’t focus and have this belief of failure every time the ball comes,” Parker said. “And if not, it becomes this epidemic. And maybe that’s what happened in some ways (last season) that just turns into this monster that you can’t really stop.
“And how do you do that? Just by mental wiring and trying to get a bunch of young men to understand and trust and have confidence and allow me to kind of carry that burden as opposed to them.”
The wide receivers as a whole were a major issue in the 2018 season, and the sharp decline of Penn State’s offense after a hot September led to Corley’s dismissal less than 24 hours after a loss in the Citrus Bowl.
It was a tough spot for Corley, who was originally hired to be the running backs coach last January but was moved by Franklin to the wide receivers job two weeks later when he brought Seider to the staff.
It was the second assistant Franklin fired in his eight seasons as a head coach, joining offensive coordinator John Donovan in November 2015.
“Those things are really, really challenging for me,” Franklin said. “I’d love to go through my whole career with never doing that. … And I still struggle with that today because I understand the impact that it has. I look at the whole picture of it.
“But I also have a responsibility to the other coaches and staff members in my program. And I also have responsibility to our players. And I also have a responsibility to the lettermen and to the fans. So you’ve got to balance that. But it’s not an easy decision.”
As it is, the unit will have something of a clean slate in 2019.
Some of the players that struggled are gone. DeAndre Thompkins graduated while Juwan Johnson and Brandon Polk are looking for new teams as grad transfers.
Slot receiver KJ Hamler returns as the team’s most productive wideout and will be a redshirt sophomore. The outside starting jobs will be fully up for grabs with true sophomore Jahan Dotson and redshirt freshmen Justin Shorter and Daniel George battling redshirt sophomores Mac Hippenhammer and Cam Sullivan-Brown.
Florida products John Dunmore and TJ Jones will join the group before training camp.
Franklin also mentioned two walk-ons who could figure in, slot man Isaac Lutz and Dan Chisena, who has split time between football and track at Penn State.
“I’m perfectly aware of the challenges,” Parker said. “Hopefully I’m equipped to get the room wired to be able to handle tough times. That’s what we’re supposed to do as adults — stare down the barrel with them and help them become better, help myself become better and see what kind of product we put on the field in a year.
“… If we can find structure, find leadership within it and make it what it needs to be from a talent and fundamental (standpoint) … the sky’s the limit.”
