Penn State Football: Pry, Defense Waiting For Trick Plays

PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — Washington coach Chris Petersen is as synonymous with trick plays as any coach to ever walk the sidelines.

Be it the hook and lateral, the Statue of Liberty or everything in between, Petersen’s teams have uncorked something a little unorthodox in all of their biggest games. And more often than not it has worked.

Ask Penn State defensive coordinator Brent Pry about those plays and he just smiles, and it’s a pained smile. How can you prepare for the unexpected?

‘Well let’s put it this way, we’ve rolled back about 10 years and have covered a bunch of tricks and gimmicks and gadgets,’ Pry said Wednesday shaking his head. ‘I’m sure we won’t see one of those, but we’ll see something. We try and incorporate it every day into our practice so our guys aren’t surprised.’

His favorite? Well, he is a defensive coordinator after all.

‘It’s a laundry list, I don’t like any of them.’

Even so the Nittany Lions will almost see something unique come Saturday, they’ll just have to hope it doesn’t swing the game like it did in 2007.

Petersen had this to say about his trick play package last season prior to playing Alabama

“I hesitate to even get into the strategy behind it, but I will talk about it a little bit because I think it’s so funny because people don’t get it. And I don’t want people to get it,” Petersen said. “When we were at Boise and became like Trick Play University because of the Fiesta Bowl when we ran three that we kind of had to against Oklahoma to make them work, so it was on this big stage. But if you look back at that season, we probably ran one or less than one a game.

“So we’re talking about, how many plays, like 900 plays during a season and we might run less than 20, maybe 15 deceptive-type plays. But yet everybody’s like, ‘That’s all they do is run trick plays.’”