A few weeks ago — when things were more normal — new Penn State offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca pulled receiver Daniel George aside as the Nittany Lions lifted weights, music blaring across the Lasch Building.
The conversation was short, George nodding as Ciarrocca motioned with his arms, his hands working across an imaginary field. Then the two parted, George back to the weights, Ciarrocca back down one of the building’s many long hallways.
It’s safe to say things have changed since that conversation, Ciarrocca and George both confined to their respective homes, neither in the same place at the same time. Nothing is simple anymore, and it might not be simple anytime soon. Those casual follow-ups are now logistical challenges on a growing list of things that ought to be easier than they currently are.
“If you were in the office together, you would have stuck your head in somebody’s door and just asked them a quick question,” Ciarrocca said on a conference call Tuesday. “And they would have given you an answer in 20 seconds.
“When you make a phone call, it’s amazing. There’s going to be probably five minutes of BS talk that goes on before you even get to the question and then two more questions come up about stuff that aren’t even relevant to what your original question was, but you had the conversation anyway so it just takes a little bit longer.”
Of course all of this translates to the challenges of installing an entirely new offense. Although a lot of Penn State’s attack will have the similar calling cards of the past several seasons, one doesn’t hire a new offensive coordinator to change nothing at all. In turn, Ciarrocca is charged with teaching from a distance.
And of course teaching means testing.
“One of the things that we started to do is, we will have a meeting,’ Ciarrocca said. “And one of the ways we’re getting feedback is, we’ll send up a quiz on the material that we just went over. They’ll send you the quiz back. So you get a look at it and you can really kind of grade yourself as a teacher. You know if the guys all bombed the quiz you have to look at yourself and say, ‘shoot, I did not do a great job.’”
For the most part, Ciarrocca is spending his time video chatting with his quarterbacks both as a group and later on an individual basis. Your offense goes as the quarterbacks do, so time spent getting on the same page is time well spent.
But of course that’s not all Ciarrocca is up to. The life of an assistant coach is full of many duties and days that start early, 7 a.m. to be exact. According to his own planner each day follows a similar pattern: From 7 to 10 a.m. it’s various football related tasks. Then from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. it’s recruiting and recruiting calls.
Then at 3 it’s a quarterback meeting (at least on Monday) and then by 5 p.m. the day is done, briefly. After dinner, it’s another project in the evening, be it recruiting evaluations, film or other work that needs to get done.
“Right now, we have eight hours a week that we’re allowed to meet with [players],” Ciarrocca added. “We only have four quarterbacks right now so I meet with them all together. And then, usually, each one of them individually at some point during the week just to see how they’re doing, number one, and then number two they always have a question or two for me about something else.”
This is obviously not ideal, but it’s no different than what the rest of the country has to work around, and in Ciarrocca’s eyes, no reason to expect things to be any different than before by the time season finally arrives, whenever that might be.
“This is the situation that we’ve been presented with,” he said. “We’ve got to adapt and overcome the adversities that we have here. We all face adversity and everybody’s facing all kinds of different adversity throughout their life right now. It’s how do we choose to respond and so I’m excited about it and I expect to have the same type of product that we’ve always had out there in the field.”
