New Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich spoke to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, answering a wide range of questions along the way during his first media availability in his new role.
It’s easy to see why Yurcich has had such a successful career in coaching. He comes across as smart and articulate, able to translate complex ideas into something that a digital room full of reporters can understand. In terms of personality and charisma, while it’s impossible to fully assess how each work behind closed doors, Yurcich seems much more in the mold of James Franklin than his predecessor Kirk Ciarrocca.
Overall, Yurcich lived up to his billing, but eight months from Penn State’s season opening slate that will include a trip to Wisconsin and a home contest against Auburn, the questions Yurcich is really charged with answering are far more important when it’s all said and done.
Can he hit the reset button with quarterback Sean Clifford? Can he find more efficiency in the red zone? Can he help increase the Nittany Lions’ accuracy with downfield plays? Can he balance explosive plays with clock-killing drives? Can his offense move quickly while still giving Penn State’s defense time to rest both in terms of scoring or avoiding quick three-and-outs? Can he teach a lot of this over Zoom rather than in person? Does he knowledge of Ohio State translate in any meaningful way? Can his offense run the ball when it has to? The list goes on and on.
None of those curiosities could be answered on a snowy afternoon in State College, Yurcich now miles removed from sunny Austin, Texas a city enjoying a balmy 63 degree Tuesday.
Yurcich may not have been able to answer the most important questions months before they’re really asked, but here are a few answers and/or nuggets to chew on in February.
Talent and scheme:
While Yurcich was at Oklahoma State (2013-18) the Cowboys ranked in the 30s and 40s in terms of overall recruiting class rankings each of the years he was offensive coordinator. In spite of this – although 30s/40s is not horrible – Oklahoma State ranked in the Top 25 in total offense four of his six seasons at the helm.
Total offense national ranking while at Oklahoma State
- 2013: 37th
- 2014: 85th
- 2015: 22nd
- 2016: 14th
- 2017: 2nd
- 2018: 10th
Of course the Cowboys weren’t without talent and recruiting rankings are an eternal point of debate, but as Penn State grapples with its own roster management and navigates its own ups and downs in recruiting, the overarching question comes to the surface: how do you make the most out of the personnel that you have?
“I think you have to do what your personnel can do,” Yurcich said. “You can’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. So you got to make sure that you’re asking your quarterback to do things that are within his skill set and the same thing with every other position out there. Now there’s certainly comes a time where you’re trying to make sure that the personnel you’re recruiting fit into your system, but your system has to be adaptable to the talent level. […] It’s about your personnel. It’s about recruiting, that’s a big part of it. I’m not trying to undervalue scheme or what coaching, you know, how much that involves, but it’s important to get the players. There’s no question about it and we have good players here at Penn State and I’m excited to get to work with them.”
First Contact:
The prevailing theory which will likely never been confirmed is that Mike Yurcich has long been among James Franklin’s literal and/or hypothetical list of offensive coordinators he would like to hire in need of a replacement. As a result the subsequent failures of 2020 and any personality clashes between Ciarrocca and Franklin found a natural conclusion the moment Yurcich became available following Tom Herman’s firing at Texas.
It’s highly unlikely Franklin would have been able to poach Yurcich from Ohio State prior to his departure for Texas and equally as unlikely that Yurcich would have been inclined to leave Texas and his former Buckeye colleague Herman for what would generally amount to a lateral move to Penn State.
So Franklin struck while the iron was hot and while Yurcich was out of a job, almost certainly not without other programs calling him with their own level of interest.
How far back does that relationship go? Yurcich wouldn’t say if he had ever been formally interviewed by Franklin before, but he did alluded to longer ongoing relationship.
“Coach Franklin and I have had several discussions over the years […] over a long period of time, several years, and with our backgrounds going all the way back to playing days we’ve crossed paths many times. So we’ve had a lot of discussions over the years.” Yurcich said.
The Best Attack
There was a moment in time when former offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead would roll his eyes ever so slightly and just laugh when people summarized his offense as “everyone going deep” but the downfield success of Moorhead’s offense did bring up a different question. What is the best route? What’s the best way to mesh the need for explosive plays with ones that are going to succeed at a high enough rate that the risk is worth the reward?
Of course every offense will have to take chances, and you won’t win a national title running the same plays over and over again, but those things aside, what’s the best way to go about the pass attack in terms of depth, angle and objective?
“I think any good pass offense has a multitude of ways to hit in breaking routes,’ Yurcich said, fittingly with a whiteboard behind him on the wall with plays drawn on it. “I mean there’s a time to throw the ball outside because that’s what most defenses give you as, especially to the field because the hashes are so much wider than the NFL. So it’s harder to hit that, the perimeter throws to the outside to the field. However, it can’t be all one thing.
“I think your higher percentage routes break in. And I don’t think there’s any particular goal, other than trying to find the one on one, and trying to, you know, throw the ball for as many yards per completion as we can throw and still trying to get that high percentage completion rate. […] we can be 70% [completion rate] but if our yards per completion are around five to six yards you know we’d like to see that number [go up.]. It’s all give and take with that, but higher percentage and breaking routes. And there’s a time to take it outside obviously but then your percentages will go down.”
Sean Clifford completed 60% of his passes in 2020 but threw nine interceptions and had two additional fumbles returned for touchdowns. Penn State also only had 30 passing plays of over 20 yards, 50th in the nation. In 2017 Penn State had 59 of those plays, 65 in 2016.
Under Center:
Anyone who has made it this far is already well aware of the meta: quarterbacks going under center have plagued the Penn State discourse since the end of the Paterno era. While some of this has turned into a meme there’s something to be said for the benefits of Penn State going under center on occasion, especially on short yardage situations or the occasionally kneel or two.
Generally speaking the future of Penn State football won’t be dependent on where exactly the quarterback is standing third-and-two, but Yurcich didn’t entirely disregard the possibility.
“I love power football. It’s how I was raised,” Yurcich said, setting message boards afire. “There’s a time to go under center. I think it provides a lot of advantages. When you can turn your back to the defense they don’t know where the ball is necessarily so I think your play action passes can increase. I think that you can sustain a longer suck on the defense on play action pass because you’re now taking a five step drop instead of a flashback out of the gun. So I think that playing under center has a tremendous amount of advantages depending on what your schemes are.”
Those last six words will carry a lot of weight as it pertains to how much Yurcich wants to actually go under center, versus an understanding why someone – somewhere – might want to.
Tough, Smart and Skilled
Introductory press conferences have a tendency to be a bit cliche heavy. For the most part new assistant coaches haven’t spent much time with their specific, or in Yurcich’s case much time with anyone on the offense or any his quarterbacks. Certainly not enough to have an opinion about any of them – something he stressed as he stayed away from individual evaluations.
So there is a limit to how much Yurcich or anyone can say beyond the basics. As a result you’re left with a lot of very similar statements and sentiments over years worth of press conferences. No offensive coordinator is going to brag about a slow and methodical attack in 2021 and none of them are going to say “we probably won’t score much.”
So Yurcich’s take on the classics?
“Tough, smart and skilled,” he said of his offense. “And so when we line up, the most important thing is our players, how we line them up and formations and how we get them matched up and lastly it’s plays. So, players formations and plays. That’s been the key to our success, having a physical mindset. And you know the game hasn’t changed in over 120 years or however long it’s been playing, it’s still won up front. We’ve got to be physical up front, we’ve got do a great job of recruiting up front. And then we have to put speed on the field and we’ve got to have a guy behind the center that can make decisions and be accurate with the football.”
“We’ve won with all kinds of [quarterbacks] that can run it a little bit better than some but the most important thing is we have to be able to throw it accurately. We have to be smart with it, be tough, we have to be good leaders at that position, and we have to surround them with really good playmakers, guys that can make plays in space.”
