Hindsight 2021: Penn State Offense vs. Auburn
Just Like the Guy Controlling the Between-Play Beaver Stadium Music, Penn State’s Passing Attack Didn’t Let Up in a 28-20 Whiteout Win vs. Auburn
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Accountability is just a click away.
Scroll three-quarters of a digital page down the Penn State-Auburn box score released by the Sports Information Department. Don’t whine. The link is right above this paragraph. Go ahead. We’ll wait.
OK, Nooooow….stop! There! Right there: the names of every member of The Malignant Seven – better known as James Carter’s SEC officiating crew that absolutely bungled an otherwise perfect night of college football. Referee. Line Judge. Side Judge. Umpire. Back Judge. Linesman. Field Judge. They’re all listed…
…except the replay official.
That’s kinda odd, huh? Assuming total transparency is the motivator for such inclusion/intrusion why does the man (or woman) with the power to stop action and re-examine close calls frame by frame to ensure accuracy get to avoid heat and scrutiny when they, oh, I don’t know, let’s say (as a hypothetical) erroneously confirm it’s 4th down when it’s not.
Regardless, whoever you are, Mr. (Mrs./Miss) replay official, bless your heart. No, seriously. Bless your heart. If your mind read the end of that initial sentence in a facetious, disingenuous Delta Burke from Designing Women tone that wasn’t our intent. Because as much fun as it’s been for Penn State fans to plop a pile of oily rags atop the dumpster fire that was Saturday’s officiating performance, maybe we should all give it a rest because the Nittany Lions were the beneficiaries of the MOST IMPACTFUL missed call of game.
I didn’t say (write) the most egregious missed call, so put your pitchfork down, you psycho.
I said (wrote) the most impactful:
This is a safety. It wasn’t a safety but it’s a safety. The Progressive Flo Hole camera clearly shows Noah Cain’s knee down and the ball’s team-specific tramp stamp hovering above the goal line. Had the replay official stopped play – he had 40+ seconds to do so since Penn State was in Milk-It Mode – Auburn would have trailed 28-22 and possessed the ball with 3:04 left in the 4th Quarter after Jordan Stout inevitably booted the kickoff from the 20 through the back of the end zone.
Would Auburn have scored? Well, according to the Magic 8-Ball I just picked up from my office desk and shook, ‘Reply hazy, try again.’ Fine, I’ll try again. ‘Better Not Tell You Now.’
Stupid piece of junk.
Formations
Color us shocked if Mike Yurcich wasn’t stroking an evil cat (redundant, all cats are evil) perched on an armrest like that faceless bad guy from Inspector Gadget while he devised Saturday’s gameplan because it was absolutely diabolical.
New formations. New personnel packages. More wrinkles than a depressed divorcee’s dress shirt.
Can we show you our favorite 2-play sequence? Wait, of course we can, it’s our blog.
4th Quarter. 1-point game. 2nd and 7. According to our 2021 charting, Penn State hadn’t lined up in a true Pistol formation until this play, which forces Auburn to diagnose this foreign look on the fly. 3-Parker Washington comes in motion, but he’s not really part of the concept. Auburn, to its credit, stays home and doesn’t chase the SQUIRREL! pre-snap movement.
14-Sean Clifford bootlegs off the wide zone play action, pivots, turns, and comes dangerously close to touching a hot stove. If this off-balance, cross-body, hurried throwback toss to 10-John Lovett is a penny short of a dime, it’s a soul-crushing 6 points the other way.
Lovett weaves through tacklers for a first down…and the fun begins.
In the span of 19.6 seconds – from the instant Lovett’s backside hits the turf to the snap of the next play – Penn State stealthy realigns its entire offense in this exotic, tackle-eligible formation completely undetected.
Best Supporting Actor 79-Caedan Wallace flexes out wide and bows his head like a pouting toddler to conceal his out-of-place jersey number. 53- Rasheed Walker bumps inside to neighbor 73-Mike Miranda, 68-Eric Wilson shifts from left to right guard while 70-Juice Scruggs fills Wallace’s vacancy.
86-Brenton Strange is unaccounted for but eligible. Potential All-SEC safety 21-Smoke Monday gets sucked into the two-receiver screen concept near the Penn State sideline. Easy pickings.
The transition from Pistol to reshuffled Shotgun was so quick, so fluid, so seamless, and so well choreographed that we’re curious whether or not this was a designed (albeit conditional) two-play script from the start – that IF Penn State hit big on the throwback screen it would automatically trigger this super-villainy sleight of hand from Yurcich on the very next play.
Two weeks ago, in our Wisconsin HINDSIGHT write-up, we mentioned how Yurcich loves to show certain concepts/formations early to set up potent evolutions of those same concepts/formations later in the game. If you remember vs. the Badgers, the reason Jahan Dotson was uncovered deep on the game-winning touchdown drive – the chunk-play completion Clifford severely underthrew – was because Wisconsin’s defenders bit hard on a pump fake to 3-Parker Washington running orbit motion in the flat.
Well, Yurcich tried the same bait-and-hook philosophy on Saturday…it just didn’t work.
Here’s the bait:
Six offensive linemen – 72-Bryce Effner is the extreme right tackle or the Alex Jones tackle. Three tight ends, what we call TRIDENT. Clifford JayCulters (verb) out to the field side. 44-Tyler Warren and 86-Strange shift into the backfield. Direct snap to Warren. The former high school QB fakes the give to 5-Jahan Dotson running motion and BillyHoyles (verb) into the end zone.
Now, here’s the hook:
Notice how slowly Warren and Strange shift into position here? Pretty sure that’s intentional — to let Auburn’s defenders recognize that they’ve seen this before in hopes they’ll abandon coverage responsibilities and cheat on another direct-snap run by Warren. If they bite, Warren would simply flip the ball to the uncovered Strange on an easy TD pass. Problem is 21-Monday stayed true to his man coverage assignment on Strange, so Warren just had to eat this for a loss.
Oh, Penn State also flashed an Offset I-Form alignment using TRIDENT personnel for the first time this season. Enjoy, gramps.
Substitutions
Not suspended (but probably suspended) Baylor transfer RB John Lovett finally made his blue-and-white debut following a two-week absence that had nothing to do with him being suspended (but probably had everything to do with him being suspended). Though he only carried the ball twice for nine yards on Saturday, Lovett’s presence in the run game should increase substantially as the season progresses, especially if 24-Keyvone Lee continues to be careless with the football.
Penn State featured 2 or 3 TE personnel packages on 31 of 66 total snaps — 46.9 percent. By far, Yurcich’s willingness to go tight end-heavy on offense has been the most surprising aspect of his brief tenure in Happy Valley. This past off-season we scouted 3 Yurcich games from Oklahoma State and 2 from his one-year respite at Texas in 2020. In those contests, Yurcich’s offense had 2 TEs on the field 7.3 percent of the time and never used 3 TEs at once.
Opportunities at wide receiver continue to dwindle for non-starters. 6-Cam Sullivan-Brown, 8-Marquis Wilson, and 89-Winston Eubanks all ran routes but were never targeted vs. Auburn.
72-Effner vultured snaps from 68-Eric Wilson at LG, the bulk of them coming on Penn State’s 91-yard touchdown drive in the 2nd Quarter. The other four starting offensive lineman didn’t come off the field.
Offensive Line
Best pass protection percentage we’ve charted in the 11-month, 12-game lifespan of this blog. Previous top mark was 81.3% clean pocket for benched Sean Clifford and one-week-away-from-being-benched Will Levis against Nebraska in 2020.
| PSU Pass Pro 2021 | Clean Pocket | Disturbed Pocket | % Clean Pocket |
| Wisconsin | 28 | 12 | 70% |
| Ball State | 27 | 10 | 73% |
| Auburn | 30 | 6 | 83.3% |
You get a clean pocket!
You get a clean pocket!
Everybody (named Sean Clifford) gets a clean pocket!
According to PFF, big, bad, 12-sacks-through-two-weeks Auburn hit Clifford once…presumably on that delayed blitz late in the 2nd quarter, the one that concluded with that cloud-tickler interception. For reasons that should be questioned and can’t be answered, Auburn chose not to follow the successful twist/stunt blueprint inked by Wisconsin in Week 1 and traced by Ball State in Week 2 – an observation I first heard while listening to Thomas Frank Carr’s (Friend of The Blog) postgame show on YouTube as the better half and I crawled along Park Avenue last Saturday night.
As far as run blocking is concerned, yeah it’s a problem, but blame shouldn’t solely be dumped on the big fellas. Hate to say this, but Noah Cain isn’t right. Might be a mental thing. Might be a physical thing. Might be both. To illustrate our point, we clipped these three superbly blocked run plays in which Cain got to the second level with ease but couldn’t generate additional yards once he arrived there.
Quarterback Play
One trick play = two passing charts.
| Clifford vs. AU | Accurate | Inaccurate | Wild/Off-Target |
| Easy Throw | 13 | 1 | 1 |
| Moderate Throw | 10 | 2 | 0 |
| Difficult Throw | 3 | 1 | 2 |
*Does not include 1 Throwaway, but does include throws negated by penalty.
| Dotson vs. AU | Accurate | Inaccurate | Wild/Off-Target |
| Easy Throw | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Moderate Throw | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Difficult Throw | 0 | 0 | 0 |
As tempting as it is to trek out on this wobbly limb, it’s still a tad premature to suggest what Yurcich has done with Clifford rivals what Joe Brady did with Joe Burrow at LSU in 2019. What we ARE comfortable declaring, though, is that Yurcich has successfully transformed Sean Clifford into someone other than Sean Clifford…that is, the jittery, too-amped, erratic, inaccurate Sean Clifford from 2019-2020 that Penn State often won in spite of, not because of.
Been trumpeting this for three weeks – and hope to keep copying and pasting this same observation from now until the first week of December — but Clifford’s composure, feel for the pocket/comfort within the pocket, and willingness to extend plays while staying ready to throw has been an absolute revelation.
Great protection here, but when Clifford doesn’t like his first read (Cain) or his second read (either KLS or Strange on the mesh) and senses impending danger, he removes himself from the tackle box and spots 5-Dotson surveying the back of the end zone uncovered. Technically, we marked this difficult off-platform throw as “inaccurate” because Dotson did have to leap to catch it, but it’s a helluva toss.
Searching for a few more examples of Clifford thriving out of the pocket? Look no further.
Pass Catchers
Hmm, so we better get out in front of this.
So, um, way back in July – which is basically a bajillion years ago — we published a post titled, “Most Replaceable/Irreplaceable Nittany Lions.” Yeah, you can probably guess where this is going…Jahan Dotson topped our Most Replaceable list. What worse, we actually wrote, “if Dotson did miss time in 2021, would it really be the end of the universe?”
Yes. Yes it would.
Through three weeks, Dotson has been the only Penn State WR to consistently threaten opponents at all three levels – short, intermediate, and deep. Fast enough to pop the top off the pickle jar, elusive enough to make guys miss in tight confines, and savvy enough to pull defenders’ strings on routes vs. man coverage and sniff out soft spots vs. zone, there’s no one capable of doing what Dotson does for this offense on Penn State’s roster.
| Week 3: Auburn | Routine | Tough/Contested | Incredible |
| 5-Dotson | 6/6 | 3/3 | 1/1 |
| 3-Washington | 4/5 | 4/4 | |
| 13-KLS | 3/3 | 1/1 | |
| 86-Strange | 4/4 | ||
| 84-Johnson | 1/1 | ||
| 44-Warren | 1/1 | ||
| 10-Lovett | 1/1 |
*Does not include 5 uncatchable passes, but does include catches erased by penalty
Dotson saved Clifford from tossing at least two interceptions on Saturday. The first you just saw in the clip above – if Dotson doesn’t sky for that ball it’s a fairly routine pick for the deep Auburn DB. The second is difficult to decipher because of the restricted TV window, but watching this play live in Beaver Stadium it was clear that if Dotson didn’t work back for this ball and cut in front of the defender it would have been a turnover.
Big fan of what 3-Parker Washington brings to the table. We’ve been impressed with his improved physicality, ability to haul in contested passes and maintain control of the ball through contact. With that said, he’s got to fight through and suppress his initial instinct to gather, retreat and assess the situation, ESPECIALLY on 3rd down.
Grab. Tuck. Go. Figure the rest out between steps up the field.
On these two plays, Washington’s indecisiveness and lack of spatial awareness – literally, just fall forward and it’s a first down, bud – not only ended promising drives but surrendered the ball back to Auburn in great field position after a pair of failed 4th and 1 calls (QB Sneak, PJ Mustipher fake punt) that didn’t need to occur if Washington would have moved the chains.
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