Completing the season was a triumph for James Franklin and Penn State

At 4-5, Penn State’s football team finished with a losing record.

The team’s decision to decline a bowl invitation — made following a 56-21 home win against Illinois on Saturday — will guarantee a sub-.500 mark for the first time since 2004, when many members of the current squad were toddlers.

That’s a footnote no one wearing a blue and white jersey wants to be a part of, particularly for a program that entered the season with legitimate aspirations of a conference title or even a place in the College Football Playoff.

At the same time, just having a season free of the cancellations or delays that have disrupted other programs around the country during the coronavirus pandemic was a triumph for Penn State.

Along with Rutgers, Penn State was the only other team in the Big Ten to play a complete nine-game season.

“There’s so many people that worked hard to get this to get this done,” coach James Franklin said via video chat Saturday. “But at the end of the day, it’s about the people following the policies put in place, the procedures put in place, and to ask 18- to 23-year-old guys to do it and do it on a consistent basis. I know they’re sick of me, tell them to put their mask on or social distance or this or that. It’s just like, constant, constant. And I thought we had a really good plan, and we had a really good policy and at the end of the day people made the choices to follow it, not only when they were with us, but when they’re away from us. And that same thing with the staff, you know, not only did the players have to sacrifice, but the staff had to sacrifice. I think about the student managers, I think about the student trainers and the sacrifices that they had to make with their roommates. With our staffs’ children and wives that are going to school and those types of things.

“Everybody’s dealing with this, and it’s been challenging on everybody. But then you try to do that while also running a major college football program and all the demands that come from that, and all the demands that come with being a student at one of the most respected academic institutions in the country. It’s been a lot. It’s been a lot. I’m appreciative that we’ve been able to, up to this point, knock on wood, handle this thing pretty well.”

A 4-5 mark won’t look good on Franklin’s profile in the media guide.

But the fact that there will be an entry for the 2020-21 season is a point of pride for him.

“I am very proud of everybody for battling through it,” Franklin said. “It’s hard to do this under normal circumstances, and even more now. I’m also really proud how we’ve kept everybody healthy. We’re one of only a handful of teams in the Big Ten and in the country that didn’t miss a game during the season, no postponements, none of those types of things.”

With the challenge of this season behind him, Franklin is eager to get his program back to how it typically functions.

“You’ve got these freshmen, this is all they know,” Franklin said. “And this is not, this is not what Penn State is like. I want them to feel what this town is like on a game weekend. There’s energy and there’s a buzz and the restaurants are doing great and the bars are doing great and the hotels are doing great and it’s Happy Valley. I want people to experience that. And for our freshmen, they haven’t experienced that. And our sophomores, they’ve only experienced that 50 percent of the time. Even my staff, I’ve got staff that have a comment of never seen what this place is normally like, so I’m trying to remind everybody of that as much as I possibly can.”