If you’re Penn State defensive coordinator Tom Allen one of the things you’re the happiest about is how you wake up.
Imagine spending over half a decade waking up and then — immediately — everything was your problem. Like, everything. Offense, defense, recruiting, NIL, donors, Board of Trustees relationships, outreach, family matters, player management, roster management, relationships. The list is endless.
And then one day, sure, you’ve got to pay attention to plenty of things, but now you’re *just* a defensive coordinator. So much of this isn’t your problem anymore. Now you might even get the chance to hit snooze once before rolling out of bed for the long – but manageable – day ahead.
“I feel the difference is,” Penn State defensive coordinator and longtime Indiana head coach Tom Allen said. “I did it for so long that you can get used to dealing with all those things. [Now] it’s kind of like a heaviness on you that has been lifted. I don’t think you can probably understand unless you’ve carried those burdens of the team and everything that goes into the team from from every aspect.”
Now Allen gets to go back to some of the things he loves. Teaching, that’s fun, watching film, you could stay up all night doing that. in fact Allen does, so there goes the theory about getting more sleep. On the bright side, at least he’s staying up on purpose, and not because of the stresses. Of course, there are some exceptions.
“I’ve replaced that [heaviness] with [being up] into the night watching film, which is something I really enjoy doing so I don’t mind my mind being wrapped up in it,” Allen said. “I wake up in the morning thinking about scheme things, wrinkles and adjustments. How can we better do this defensively? And honestly I wasn’t able to do that, even though I still stayed involved defensively, even when I was co-defensive coordinator as a head coach. That was the big challenge. So to be freed of all that, that’s what I looked forward to when I accepted this position. And it’s been I’ve been reminded of it on a daily basis.”
Of course there are other things to get used to as well. Imagine spending years and years trying to beat teams like Penn State. While Allen was at Indiana he was responsible for trying to build a program that had the distinct joy of facing some of the best programs in America on an annual basis. Now he’s part of one of those programs.
So that means coming to work and in a strange way, facing some of your shortcomings.
“Walking into the facility, there’s pictures of, you know, teams I coached playing against Penn State,” Allen says with a laugh, still insisting that former quarterback Michael Penix made it across the line in Penn State’s controversial overtime loss to the Hoosiers in 2020. “So that’s different.”
Speaking of challenges, there is an interesting one when it comes to Allen’s role this year. Consider his counterpart, offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki. He’s tasked with trying to improve a good but not overly explosive or overly dynamic offense. There is a lot of room to improve, a lot of room to get better and take home some credit. Not to say it’s any easy job, but the room to grow is visible.
Now back to Allen, who inherits a defense that was among the nation’s best last year. You can nitpick things here or there, but generally speaking Penn State’s defense was about as good as it gets. For Allen to make it better is almost impossible, in turn, it’s a lot easier to get worse than better. So no pressure. Fortunately for Allen, some personnel changes give him new clay to mold, but the bar is high, no question about it.
“You don’t dwell on that,” Allen said. “You dwell on the fact of how we’re going to be the very best defense in 2024 [that will] allow us to win a championship. Yeah, there’s no doubt, last year’s defense, statistically, was phenomenal. And you can’t deny that and that’s awesome. But as I told our players, it’s a new year, you. You can’t count on any of that, to give you any level of success in 2024 … [former defensive coordinator Manny Diaz] did a phenomenal job with the defense here. And that’s great. But that’s part of our history now.”
“History is something that you learn from and you can take pride in, but it doesn’t do anything to help you for the next opportunity. And so we have to be able to understand that we have to take our current roster and we’ve got to shape them into the best defense of the country. And that’s the goal. That it did happen a year ago doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen a year from now. So to me, I don’t sit here and think about not screwing it up. I think about how we will make it better. I think that’s it. Your mindset is such a powerful thing.”
How this unfolds, especially in a new look Big Ten, is really anyone’s guess. It seems safe to assume that until Penn State fields a bad defense that you should assume it will field a good one. But if good turns into elite is a question to be answered at a later date. For now Allen is going to – finally – get some good sleep.
