Penn State Football Doomed by Lack of Running Game and No Options Behind Ailing Clifford

“We felt like Sean gave us the best opportunity to win,” Penn State coach James Franklin said on Saturday following the Nittany Lions’ 20-18 overtime (nine of them) loss.

Which says a lot about a lot of things.

Clifford, clearly in pain for the entirety of the game, was limited running the ball and clearly not fully comfortable throwing it. In turn, the three-year starter was a shell of himself, registering negative rushing yards [-28] for just the second time in his career as a starter. Through the air he was 19-for-34, managing one touchdown and 165 yards. All the same, his misses were sporadic, and throws he normally makes were far less of a certainty.

“There [were] no limitations at all,” Clifford said afterwards, but his body language told a different story as Penn State struggled to find any offensive rhythm behind a quarterback that spent not an insignificant portion of the afternoon hunched over.

All told, the decision to play Clifford and the struggles Penn State subsequently had are an indictment of a few things, from the development and retention of a backup quarterback to the inability to run the ball on a day when an otherwise pass-first offense was set to be hampered.

To answer the follow up question: Backup quarterback Ta’Quan Roberson was available on Saturday and while Penn State went as far to play then backup quarterback Will Levis for an entire game in 2019 against hapless Rutgers with Clifford sidelined with an injury, Roberson seemed miles from ever sniffing the field on Saturday.

If this is the fault of anyone or simply a matter of fact is the point of debate. On the one hand, Roberson was never set to be Penn State’s backup quarterback for as long as Levis was still in the fold. Subsequently, preparing a quarterback over the course of the summer, and more specifically to Saturday, in two weeks time — a quarterback who seemed destined to hold the title of “depth player” on the roster for much if not all of his career — is no small task.

The assumption you can coach Roberson up in two weeks better than he has been coached for the last three years is perhaps a statement that he is who he is more than anything else. It does not absolve Franklin and offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich of their duties, but Yurcich has spent the summer getting Clifford up to speed on a new offense and Franklin had spent the better part of the last two years preparing Levis for the role Roberson now holds on half a year’s notice.

“The guy that’s been in the program for a long time and the guy that’s getting the most reps should be able to widen that gap,” Franklin said of Roberson earlier in the week. “Right now, it’s somewhat close. So, I got a meeting with both of those guys [Roberson and freshman Christian Veilleux] today, and kind of challenged both of them and let them know that we’re going to be evaluating everything.”

And as Franklin noted, the Nittany Lion coaching staff was going to invest its first team snaps in the player who would give them the best return on investment Saturday. A nearly invisible running game would have helped neither quarterback, let alone one with far less experience.

To that point, any hopes of turning Penn State’s rushing attack into a viable second punch for an otherwise competent passing game has been long abandoned by anyone outside the Lasch Building. A stable of backs have shown flashes of what gave fans such great optimism in the past, but nine tackles for a loss by Illinois (some sacks included) and 62 total rushing yards offered up no support to an ailing Clifford.

“You can’t go from heavy pass to heavy run in one week,” Franklin said postgame. “You got to be able to be mixed in to be balanced; we weren’t able to do that today.”

To say the least.

There is a tendency to overthink losses for the sake of sounding smart. But boiled down to its most basic parts, Penn State’s loss was the product of a few simple things: the Nittany Lions can’t run the ball, their best option at quarterback can’t run and is limited in his throwing, and their backup quarterback has always been destined to be exactly that.

Any game that results in a loss could have been coached better, but what is Franklin to do in a week that wasn’t done in the offseason? Quarterbacks don’t grow on trees, backup quarterbacks don’t turn into starters in two weeks and running games are rarely found in the depths of the October cold.