As Will Levis thrives at Kentucky, ESPN asks why it didn’t happen at Penn State
It is nearly impossible to go a week of college football without keeping an eye on how former Penn State quarterback Will Levis continues to do with Kentucky. Levis continues to be a high-profile quarterback prospect for the 2023 NFL draft and some draft experts believe there is a chance he could go No. 1 overall. If that is the case, it would be the highest draft pick ever recruited by James Franklin, which begs the question; why didn’t Levis succeed at Penn State on this kind of level? Perhaps more importantly, why was Penn State holding Levis back so much?
ESPN published a featured story on Levis this week digging into the transfer portal star for Kentucky as a draft prospect and his path to becoming one of the hottest names on the draft board. Levis shared a thought about why he made the move to Kentucky by explaining he just needed his opportunity to shine.
“I’ve always had confidence in myself. I always thought I was the best quarterback in the country, and nobody else was going to tell me otherwise,” Levis said in a story published by ESPN recently. “I just needed the platform to prove it. I needed the opportunity to get comfortable with playing the position at this level, and I feel like that’s something I didn’t have at Penn State.”
Levis is accurate on that point. Levis was backing up Sean Clifford while in Happy Valley, and Clifford was giving the coaching staff no reason to make a quarterback change. Former offensive coordinator Ricky Rahne, now the head coach at Old Dominion, suggested that would have been a tough decision to make given the circumstances.
“Everyone always asks what happened and why Penn State didn’t start Will over Sean,” Rahne said to ESPN. “When we first picked Sean, Will wasn’t ready to start yet, and then it became hard to replace a guy who had won 11 games. People kind of forget that.”
Clifford led Penn State to a Cotton Bowl appearance and a victory in 2019, his first season as the starting quarterback following the graduation of Trace McSorley. Clifford did have his struggles during the COVID-impacted 2020 season, but things got better in the second half of the shortened season. But it was after that 2020 season that Levis opted to pursue his opportunity to shine out of the transfer portal, and he quickly took flight with Kentucky in 2021.
“We knew we had to go get him, but because of the way he was utilized at Penn State, you really had to search for certain throws,” Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops said. “There was the Nebraska game from the year before, throws we watched and saw and confirmed what we thought.”
Who knows how things might have turned out if Levis was deemed more ready at the time it came to make a decision on who would ultimately succeed McSorley as Penn State’s starting quarterback, or if Levis had been given an opportunity to lead the offense to his full potential when things were not going well in 2020.
It will forever be a mystery question for Penn State football and head coach James Franklin.
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