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First Posted: 12/9/2014 For James Franklin, there was one little hitch in this whole Pinstripe Bowl plan.
Santa Claus.
&#8220;The only challenge is that I have a 6-year-old and a 7-year-old,&#8221; the Penn State coach said Tuesday, recreating a necessary conversation he had with his daughters.
&#8220;We&#8217;re leaving when?&#8221;
&#8220;The 22nd.&#8221;
&#8220;And we&#8217;re coming back?&#8221;
&#8220;The 27th.&#8221;
&#8220;How is Santa going to know where we&#8217;re at?&#8221;
Scheming for Boston College might be the easy part.
&#8220;One daughter was distraught,&#8221; Franklin said. &#8220;The other was like, &#8216;So we&#8217;re gonna open up presents at the hotel and then come back and have Christmas again?&#8217; &#8220;
Depends on who wins, maybe.
Franklin got his first look at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday along with Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour, joined by Boston College counterparts Steve Addazio and Brad Bates for an introductory press conference for the bowl game.
With the field still set up for football from a recent Lehigh-Lafayette game, both schools got a sneak peek ahead of their Dec. 27 matchup in the Bronx.
&#8220;Walking through here today, seeing all the history and all the tradition and all the championships and all the great players and what this place means to New York, there are a lot of parallels at Penn State,&#8221; Franklin said. &#8220;What Beaver Stadium means to our people. The pride.
&#8220;There are a lot of parallels between the New York Yankees and what they represent and Penn State and what we represent.&#8221;
The Lions&#8217; first bowl game in three years comes two head football coaches and athletic directors later as Franklin and Barbour carried on from Bill O&#8217;Brien and Dave Joyner.
Franklin came aboard in January and Barbour was hired in July. But they both invoked Penn State&#8217;s past on Tuesday.
&#8220;There are a number of reasons this is really special to us,&#8221; Barbour said. &#8220;First and foremost as always will be, and I know Boston College shares this with us, is our team and the young men in our program and how excited they will be. Certainly New York, at Christmas time, what an incredible place.
&#8220;And for us at Penn State, certainly the iconic head coach Joe Paterno being from New York is not lost on us. We think that that&#8217;s a wonderful synergy for us and for Penn State to return to New York.&#8221;
Paterno, of course, grew up a Dodgers fan in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. But Penn State has some history at the old Yankee Stadium, playing there in 1923, 1925 and 1929.
That almost-forgotten history of college football in the Bronx was something the Yankees and the family of late Yanks patriarch George Steinbrenner wanted to recreate when founding the Pinstripe Bowl four years ago.
&#8220;The Boss loved football,&#8221; Yankees president Randy Levine said. &#8220;When we were building the new place, he wanted to restore it to greatness for college football. The Steinbrenner family has been incredibly supportive of this effort. I think The Boss is looking down on us and smiling today.&#8221;
One imagines he&#8217;d even forgive hosting a team from Boston for the occasion.
Both Levine and Yankees COO Lonn Trost said the history between Penn State and Boston College made for an attractive matchup for them.
Three of the first four editions of the Pinstripe Bowl featured one team from the Midwest &#8212; Kansas State, Iowa State and Notre Dame &#8212; making this the second time the Yankees were able to pair two Eastern teams together. It&#8217;s the first year of an eight-year contract with the Big Ten and ACC.
&#8220;We&#8217;ve seen this transform from hoping to get clubs here to look where we are now with two tremendous college teams,&#8221; Trost said.
Long-range forecasts peg the temperature for the game to be in the low 30s with a possibility of flurries in the morning before kickoff.
&#8220;Football is supposed to be played in cold weather,&#8221; Levine said. &#8220;It&#8217;s a cold-weather sport. I think especially with this game, two great Northeast teams, that&#8217;s what football is all about. They play in all kind of weather.&#8221;
For Penn State, just getting one more game &#8212; and the extra weeks of practice that go with it &#8212; was the key, regardless of the temperature at kickoff.
Especially for the players who stayed with the Lions when they could have transferred without penalty in the year following the NCAA sanctions.
&#8220;We have 49 guys that stuck with Penn State when Penn State needed them to be their strongest,&#8221; Franklin said. &#8220;It&#8217;s a great lesson for all of us. If you have a good attitude and you persevere, good things will happen.
&#8220;We&#8217;re so thankful those guys will be able to finish this out the right way. They&#8217;ll forever be remembered for what they did for the program, the community and the university as a whole.&#8221;

Pinstripe fits Penn State