Introduction
This feels different. Today we don’t write with a feeling of dread but rather mild contentment. I’m still not sure that the Penn State football team is “good” but maybe, at least, they’re recovering from the disaster that was the first five weeks of the season and beginning to figure things out.
Basic Statistics – Summary
Finally, we can turn the first row green for the Lions who won the most important category of any game – the score. Not only that, but they pretty much dominated the rest of the contest too, racking up 131 more yards, controlling the ball for more than 36 minutes, and not turning the ball over (not even once!). Even the one category that the Wolverines won – rush yards per attempt – is misleading because Penn State still had 80 more total rushing yards.
Look, it wasn’t pretty and there’s still A LOT to be desired, especially in the passing game, but this was an objectively better performance than what we all witnessed in the first five weeks. There was a feeling of competence and decisiveness to the offense. There seemed to be variety in the playcalling. The defense, while still not being able to contain an outside running game, appeared to generally be more aggressive than in weeks gone-by. I want to believe that this is something a team can build upon. There’s an adage in the market: “Stocks take the staircase up and the elevator down, If you consider the 2019 Cotton Bowl as peak Penn State football, the program took a broken, freefalling elevator down through the first five games of 2020. Maybe this is the first stair-step back up towards that peak we used to know, and perhaps took for granted.
