An Alignment That Put The ‘Smashmouth’ In Mike Yurcich’s Smashmouth Spread At Oklahoma State, The Diamond Formation Has Been Re-Imagined In Happy Valley Thanks To A Collection Of Tight Ends That Can Do More Than Just Wreck Stuff. 

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As a fanboy of studying offensive football, I’m a sucker for some good wrinkles.

Not the wrinkles that suddenly appear the millisecond you blow out the candles on your 40^th birthday cake, nor the wrinkles you lazily try to smooth out of an unironed shirt on a rushed workday morning with sprinkles of tap water and a 5-minute tumble in the dryer (always does the trick). No, I’m talking about play-calling wrinkles – those delightful miniscule scheme adjustments that coordinators make as a season goes on.

In Week 8 vs. Ohio State, Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich finally flashed a formational wrinkle — a blast from the past dating back to his Okie State days – that had previously been oddly absent throughout his tenure in Happy Valley. It’s called the Diamond Formation.

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Penn State on Friday announced potential plans to consider a project of unspecified scope or cost – pending approval, of course.

Sigh.

However, in making this nowhere-near-definitive announcement during a board of trustees meeting and subsequent media release, university president Neeli Bendapudi confirmed that Beaver Stadium is going to receive a renovation rather than a replacement, which was not exactly surprising but probably nonetheless needed saying. Also of interest in the release was that “the project also has the potential to expand use beyond football game days.”

More on that second part in a bit. As for the big sorta-news, Bendapudi, newly minted athletic director Patrick Kraft, and the various other Penn State administrators who will be involved in the project will have some interesting decisions to make about the future of what has become, for better and worse, one of the most iconic venues in all of sport. And all that might be at stake is the loyalty of one of the largest and most passionate fan bases in the world.

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This rarely-used Run and Shoot concept within Mike Yurcich’s offense has been more ‘miss’ than ‘hit’ through two seasons in Happy Valley…but that could quickly change now that a certain someone is the QB in command. 

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The year is 1965 and Mouse Davis, a diminutive high school football coach in BFE, Oregon, is desperately searching for a solution to his “pissant” problem. By pissant (Mouse’s words, not ours) we mean that a bunch of stringy, short, skinny, sawed-off but swift young adults litter his roster.

So Mouse – a pissant himself, hence the nickname — picks up a book. Not just any book, though.

In a storyline that eerily parallels Biff Tannen’s rise to wealth/power in Back To The Future 2, Davis thumbs through a copy of Tiger Ellison’s book “Run and Shoot Football: Offense of the Future” – The Old Testament of Run and Shoot football, if you will – and it forever changes his life.

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Recruiting is not fantasy football, where a coach can look at his roster, see which areas are lacking, and acquire new players who will be immediate upgrades at those specific positions. They have to recruit the best players in the class regardless of position, and while that doesn’t mean signing 12 scholarship linemen and six running backs in the same class, for example, rather than a group spread more evenly over several positions, it doesn’t mean they’re going to fill the positions of need in every cycle, either.

Sometimes, though, the best players wind up being the players a program needs the most, and a glance at the top of Penn State’s Class of 2023 hints that the Nittany Lions could very well have gotten much better at a few positions at which they’ve struggled for several years.

The two highest-ranked players in the class, both top 60 players nationally according to the On3 consensus rankings, are offensive linemen Jven Williams and Alex Birchmeier. Two of the next seven highest-ranked signees are linebackers Tony Rojas and Ta’Mere Robinson.

Neither position group has lived up to its respective expectations in recent years at Penn State. Linebacker U did have Micah Parsons terrorizing Big Ten backfields for a couple of seasons, but prior to Parsons being named to the all-conference first team in 2019, the last Penn State linebacker to make that list was Mike Hull in 2014. (Rising sophomore Abdul Carter might have something to say about that this autumn.)

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What’s old (like really old) is new again, as Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich’s 2021 flirtation with an antiquated alignment morphed into a full-blown infatuation in 2022.

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Apparently, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit didn’t get the memo.

In the dying breaths of the Rose Bowl’s 1^st quarter, beneath a gloomy, outlier Southern California sky that deceased journalistic windbag Grantland Rice would have gushed over in his run-on, 300-word, one-sentence lead in the next day’s newspaper, Penn State lined up in a T Formation for the 27^th time this season.

To those who diligently watched every game of Penn State’s bounceback 2022 campaign, this was no big deal – standard operating procedure in short-yardage situations.

And yet — as you’ll hear below if you click the video clip – both veteran announcers sounded absolutely bewildered/befuddled/flustered when the Nittany Lions suddenly whipped out this X’s and O’s antique near the goal line.

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Like Jay Bilas at the NBA Draft, expect to hear the word ‘UPSIDE’ repeated ad nauseam when announcers and pundits analyze Penn State’s newest out-of-market roster addition. 

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Score one for the Shields Building.

The rusty bike chain on Penn State’s Transfer Portal Schwinn during 2021-22 open recruiting windows, James Franklin’s calculated off-season lobbying about the University Park campus’ sluggish admissions process WD-40’d (verb) the turnaround time needed to get prospective student-athletes accepted and registered for classes just a year later.

Case in point: Malik McClain.

According to Sean Fitz of On3, the former Florida State sophomore receiver officially entered the Transfer Portal on Wednesday, January 11^th, took an official visit to Penn State on Sunday, January 15^th, and attended his first class at Penn State on Wednesday, January 18^th. No word if he was 10 minutes early or seated in the front row.

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If you made it through any of Penn State’s 13 games this season without the words “Drew Allar” escaping your lips or even running through your brain, you are likely part of a small minority of Nittany Lion fans who, despite what they might have thought about Sean Clifford, were and remain excited to see what the young stud QB can do when given full-time control of the offense.

With Clifford out of the picture and Allar the presumed favorite to answer that question, a couple of related queries spring to mind as the dust settles following the close of the first portal window:

Who the hell is he going to throw to? And who is going to coach them?

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James Franklin likes to talk about the four core values of his program, mantras that don’t seem to go too far below surface level but are easy to remember, widely applicable and, most importantly, well-suited to the cutthroat world of college football: Positive Attitude, Work Ethic, Compete, and Sacrifice.

After a bounce-back season that he and his program desperately needed, Penn State’s head football coach should consider adding a fifth core value, one that would slot nicely among the other four and just might be more responsible for the Nittany Lions’ current and future successes as any of the others: Adaptability.

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David Joyner had to deal with unprecedented NCAA sanctions.

Sandy Barbour guided the athletic department through a pandemic.

Patrick Kraft has a tougher job than either of them.

Penn State introduced its new athletic director on Friday, and it was pretty much what you’d expect to see at these sorts of things. Kraft, sitting next to incoming university president Neeli Bendapudi, hit on the big points – winning, and doing things the right way, and … well, you’ve heard it all before. Kraft perhaps delivered his opening salvo with more enthusiasm than any of his recent predecessors – a relatively low bar set in that regard by Barbour, Joyner and Tim Curley – but it was essentially the same old intro, a combination of praise for the new program and promise to build on its reputation, success with honor and so on.

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Sandy Barbour announced this week that she will retire this summer, leaving Penn State with a vacancy at the head of its athletic department at the same time its new president, Neela Bendapudi, is transitioning into the big chair.

Athletic directors – not unlike quarterbacks and head coaches – usually receive disproportionate amounts of blame and credit for failure or success, but it’s still a crucial hire for Bendapudi and the university’s board of trustees, one that could shape the future for one of the country’s largest athletic departments and its prominent and not-so-prominent teams.

Instead of getting into the list of potential candidates, today we’ll look at some of the tasks that will await Barbour’s successor, in rough order of importance.

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