Another top Penn State returnee set to miss spring practice due to injury

Penn State football offensive lineman Anthony Donkoh had a medical procedure done that will keep him out of spring practice, but he will be back for preseason camp, a program spokesperson told Blue-White Illustrated on Wednesday. The Virginia native is the latest top returner from the 2025 version of the Nittany Lions to see his hopes of taking the field for new head coach Matt Campbell’s first set of drills in State College dashed. Tight end Andrew Rappleyea is now also dealing with a foot injury that will keep him off the field until later this year, BWI reported in late February.

Lions247 first reported Donkoh’s setback.

It is hardly the first injury issue the now redshirt junior has dealt with during his time in blue and white. He missed the final part of the 2024 regular season and all of the postseason with a lower-body injury. Donkoh was also questionable twice on the Penn State availability report in 2025 before contests at UCLA and with Northwestern. However, he ultimately played in both contests, albeit on a reduced snapcount.

Penn State lineman Anthony Donkoh was looking forward to hitting the field

As recently as Feb. 23, Donkoh told reporters that he was looking forward to spring practice and working under new Nittany Lions offensive line coach Ryan Clanton. After playing both tackle and guard to start his career in State College, a focus on the former was seemingly going to be in order starting later this month.

“In totality, there’s a lot of meat left on the bone for me. I’ve not even reached my full potential,” Donkoh said.

“Personally, I love playing tackle. Tackle is just fun because I can play the way I want to play. I felt like playing guard. I was very constricted a lot of times and not able to play to my strengths, per se. But at the end of the day, I was going to play whatever position that I needed to play, and I was gonna play at a high level.”

Donkoh has started 22 career games as a Nittany Lion. In 2025, he tallied 11 of them in addition to 693 snaps while playing mostly right guard but also some right tackle.

Penn State begins spring practice on March 24. Besides Donkoh and Rappleyea, others will be either partially or fully unavailable to take the field include quarterback Rocco Becht, linebacker Tony Rojas and Alex Tatsch, and new tight end Gabe Burkle, among others. It will impact the program’s plan for its annual Blue-White game on April 26. How so, however, currently remains unclear.

More: 2 PSU football thoughts 20 days before spring ball starts

“Again, we’ve got a lot of guys coming off of injury, so what does that look like,” Campbell said last month. “How do we go practice? But I think for our fan base to see us on that field and for us to be able to be out in that stadium with our fans, I think, before we play a game I think is absolutely critically important.

“We will certainly do something. What that’ll look like probably will base a lot on our health of where we’re at at that point, and then making sure we do a great job of getting out there and getting great work in, no matter what it is. We’ve got to make sure we get value out of that 15th practice.”