EVANSTON, Ill. – Heading into Penn State’s bye week some 20 days prior to the Nittany Lions’ clash with Ohio State, it’s hard to know what to make of that looming game.
The Nittany Lions are not a particularly overwhelming team on offense, but an unwavering persistence has turned Penn State into a team mastering the art of scoring 30+ points while playing like a team that you could have sworn only scored about half as many. If previous Penn State teams have won with flash, the Nittany Lions have won this season with a belief that any given defense can’t reasonably expect to stop them over and over and over again.
In a strange way, it’s hard to say for certain — even after five games — what exactly Penn State’s skill-based strength is on offense. The Nittany Lions have a talented quarterback in Drew Allar who has honed the craft of not making catastrophic decisions, but Penn State has nearly abandoned — either by design or as a result of current aptitude — a deep vertical passing game, which has limited his biggest physical attributes. Equally true, the Nittany Lions boast a rushing attack capable of putting up respectable averages but has also lacked the explosive plays that made Nick Singleton in particular one of the nation’s premier young backs.
As a result, Penn State’s strength is seemingly more a willingness to keep “sticking with it” rather than one schematic strength or trademark. “It will all work enough, eventually” is not a great bumper sticker but it does seem to put up points.
“That was my message to the team. First half is gone. Let’s play really well in the second half,” Penn State coach James Franklin said after Penn State’s 41-13 win over Northwestern on Saturday.” And I think we ended up 31-3 in the second half. Turnover battle was a tie. We won the explosive play battle. We won the third down battle, the sack battle we won convincingly, the field position battle we won, the penalty battle we did not”
Thrown together — while not always visually pleasing — the Nittany Lions should be able to bully their way to enough points to win most every game left on the schedule the same way they have the first five games of the year.
As for the two biggest meetings left on the docket, Penn State’s defense might be the reason it can win either, or both, of them.
Because for the second game in a row, the Nittany Lions played a suffocating brand of defense that finally showcased the domination at all three levels fans were expecting to see from the start of the year. Northwestern managed just two drives longer than 25 yards all game as the Wildcats found success only in fleeting moments. Penn State meanwhile racked up 12 tackles for a loss and seven sacks with quarterback hurries endless in their own right. The week prior may have featured Iowa’s rudderless offensive attack, but the Nittany Lions welcomed it all the same with a shutout performance. Ohio State and Michigan will pose a much more competent threat than any of the five teams Penn State has beaten so far. Then again the Nittany Lions will field a more competent defense than nearly every team either the Buckeyes or Wolverines have faced this year.
The question will become which team can win the persistence battle. For five games of Penn State’s season, it has been the Nittany Lions.
In the next 20 days Penn State will attack things in three areas. Recovery, preparation and the same 1-0 mentality that has worked for the better part of the past 10 years under head coach James Franklin. On the injury front, the Nittany Lions will look for good news, hopeful to finally see the return of wideout Trey Wallace and the resolution to whatever knocked Kaytron Allen out of the game on Saturday. On the preparation front, Penn State will muster up the focus to tackle a UMass team that gives the Nittany Lions a rare non-conference look in October.
They will also continue onward with Ohio State looming over the horizon. How much that preparation leaks into UMass practices will be a secret locked in Lasch.
“We got to get better this week, and that’s the fine line, right? What can we do during the week to allow the guys to recover?” Franklin added. “The weekend will be huge, especially if it’s handled the right way. And then obviously being able to dig into our self-scout, offense, defense and special teams, and then as I won’t talk about, but we’re also going to get ahead. The coaches will get ahead on the schedule as well during this by week. But, next week will be totally, obviously, on our next opponent. So those are the things that we’re looking at pretty hard, pretty heavy. I think some of the positions that Pat [Kraft] has allowed us to hire has helped with that as well. We just got more people to do more things.”
For the 1-0 part, Penn State will try not to look ahead beyond a Minuteman team that would be more than happy to spoil the game everyone has been sitting around waiting for. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the notion, but stranger things have happened, and as Penn State’s offense in particular looks to find more and more potency, it loses its biggest strength — staying with it — if it doesn’t stay with the moment.
Cut down into one big slice of Chicago pizza, Penn State sits not far from the biggest game of its season in the same place it almost always is: with a puncher’s chance. And to Franklin’s credit, consistently being in the fight counts for something. He’s just hoping the Nittany Lions are finally the ones standing when the ref calls the fight. Only time will tell if they are. In the meanwhile, the path to another 10- or 11-win season is wide open, which also counts for something.
“Obviously you’re going to have to win throughout a season a lot of different ways,” Franklin said. “We’ve been able to do that the first five weeks of the season. But I think your point is a good one. We got to be more explosive. We got to be more consistent. But again, there’s a bunch of stats that I could throw out there to you that I think a lot of programs around the country would be pretty excited about. You talk about scoring 30 points, we’re leading the country in consecutive games over 30 points. Still accurate. It’s your guys job and my job to kind of boil this thing down and critique some of the areas that we got to get better. And there’s going to be some games that we’re going to have to score some more points. There’s no doubt about it. But again, I think we’re playing really good complementary football right now. And we’re happy to be 1-0.”
