Attentive fans may have noticed a slight change to Drew Allar’s playing attire the last few weeks as the sophomore quarterback has been wearing a play sheet wristband on his left arm for the previous three games. Allar and then starting quarterback Sean Clifford had worn something similar in the late stages of last season, but Allar had yet to wear anything similar this season up until Penn State’s clash against Ohio State.
With the Nittany Lions set to face Michigan this weekend as the Wolverines find themselves in the midsts of a sign stealing scandal (the NCAA does not forbid teams from stealing signs but does forbid teams from doing advanced scouting of signs) there is a natural curiosity if Penn State is preemptively working to protect its play calling process. The answer is not really — at least that’s not what the call sheet is designed to do.
“It just creates a lot more opportunities,” Allar said on Tuesday. “Because you’re able to do a lot of different things out of the huddle as opposed to [being up tempo.] You can see what personnel we’re going to be in out of the huddle but you don’t know what formation we’re gonna line up in opposed to [being up tempo and] looking over to the sideline and everybody’s kind of moving to the formation.”
“Defenses are able to kind of adjust their calls based on the formation that they see pre snap. I think just huddling up sometimes, it’s just good breakup of tempo and it just creates more advantages for us because the defense isn’t necessarily going to be calling a defense when we’re breaking the huddle because we can snap it as soon as we get set. So I think it just creates a little bit more of an advantage for us.”
As for the process of protecting its signs, Penn State coach James Franklin says that’s an ongoing process and not necessarily something that will change this weekend simply because Penn State is facing Michigan. The Nittany Lions employ an army of play signalers and sign boards over the course of the game, all designed to call in plays to specific units or to act as decoys from the real signals.
Franklin also isn’t a big proponent of changing to headset communication, although bowl season could see that come to fruition, according to reports.
“You’ve got to have a way to disguise your signals,” Franklin said earlier this season. “Everybody does it, whether they do it with sheets or boards or whatever it may be. We made some changes after the bye week as well in how we operate on offense and defense. Specific to that, I probably won’t get into what’s going on at that other school and the things that are going on. I probably won’t get into that, but I think in general, we’re always aware of how we signal, are we disguising it?
“Let me say one more thing on that. I see a lot of people talking about going to the NFL system with the headsets, and I understand that. It really doesn’t solve this issue. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but if college offenses are going to decide not to huddle, you still have to be able to get the information communicated to the receivers, to the tight end. Make you can verbally communicate it to the O-line, which a lot of people do, but how does everybody else get it? So it’s either the coaches are signaling from the sideline or the quarterback is signaling from the field, and you still have some of the same issues unless you decide to huddle, which I think you saw us huddle more on Saturday than we typically do.”
However it all shakes out, you can rest assured Penn State will enter Saturday’s game with a plan to keep its plays a secret if Michigan is already in the know. It’s also safe to assume that plenty of other things will play a bigger role in the outcome.
