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The Red Zone – a place where elite offenses flourish and also-rans stall out like a 1977 Ford Pinto. To many, it’s puzzling why an offense can be so explosive, fluid and rhythmic in the open field then, suddenly, stub its toe and step on rakes once inside the final 20 yards to paydirt.
It’s an enveloping paradox Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich couldn’t untangle from during his first season in Happy Valley but did everything in his play-calling power to smooth out and make right in 2022.
As our friend and FTB contributor Nate Wilmot laid out in his end-of-year statistical recap, Penn State averaged 4.2 points per Red Zone visit in 2021 – “good” for a 114th place tie in FBS alongside neutered attacks like Rutgers and UMass. Last year, different story…the Nittany Lions averaged 5.8 points per Red Zone trip, trailing only Tennessee in this vital metric. Red Zone Efficiency represented the biggest year-to-year leap for Penn State in any basic or advanced statistical category.
When Patrick Kraft was named the athletic director at Penn State just about a year ago, he inherited one of the nation’s largest and most accomplished collection of teams, led by a football program that has gone a few more years without a natty than most fans would like but still boasts a reputation few can match and backed by one of the officially largest and unofficially most fervent alumni bases in the world. It was an enviable gig, as far as AD gigs go.
Fast forward 12 months and Kraft and his team are trying to crack the same puzzle that is stumping many of his counterparts around the country: How do you leverage passionate fans who are ready to write checks to build an NIL surplus that directly allows you to assemble the teams they root for? And, in Penn State’s case in particular, how do you manage that without tripping the political land mines that are unique to (Usually) Happy Valley?
Look around the Nittany Lions and you can see examples of the public face of NIL everywhere: Nick Singleton’s deal with West Shore Homes. Drew Allar, Kalen King, Olu Fashanu and Abdul Carter driving Teslas. Students eating Roman Bravo Young pizzas. Name, image and likeness helping various brands and putting extra cash in the pockets of the student athletes. Smiles, handshakes, American capitalism at work.
College football’s best teams stay on top by replacing NFL talent with more NFL talent, by ensuring that the Next Man Up is as good as the Last Man Who Left.
Like so many teams looking to make the next step to that elite level, Penn State is working to develop that sort of dynamic at as many positions as possible, though it might already have it in a relatively surprising part of the field.
After years of fielding solid, if unspectacular, defensive backfields, often playing behind front sevens stacked with guys who would go on to play for paychecks on Sundays, the Nittany Lions have quietly built a secondary that can stand up to any in the nation and are showing no signs that it’s not sustainable.