While the Penn State defensive coordinator’s ‘line games’ often appear like a jumbled, nonsensical mess, there’s actually a method behind the madness. 

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Defensive statistical accolades roll call (trumpet sounds):

Through the first quarter of the 2023 season, Manny Diaz’s Penn State defense stands tall at No. 1 in total defense.

The Lions also rank No.1 in the FBS in passing yards allowed.

More? OK, more: Penn State is No. 3 nationally in sacks per game, No. 3 in defensive EPA, No. 1 in passing dropback EPA, No. 2 in scoring defense, No. 11 in Red Zone defense, No. 2 in first downs allowed per game, No. 14 in third down conversions per game, No. 5 in opponent time of possession, No. 1 in yards per play allowed…

(pauses for a sip of water)

 …No. 6 in opponent punts per play, No. 15 in tackles for loss per game, No. 8 in third-down conversion percentage, No. 10 in takeaways, No. 4 in rush yards allowed per game, No. 7 in opponent completion percentage.

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Stats are fun. Stats of both the basic and advanced varieties can, if interpreted the right way, tell you a lot about a team. The ways that most sports are played and coached today are as influenced by statistics as they’ve ever been, and that includes football, perhaps the last bastion of the old-school, “go with your gut” mindset that sounds cool but doesn’t really mean anything unless you win the game.

A lack of stats can also be very telling … but not always in obvious ways.

Take the Big Ten defensive statistics, for example. The list of the top 25 leading tacklers does not include a single Penn State player, nor do the lists of leaders in passes defended or interceptions. No Nittany Lion has more than 2.5 sacks, and only Zane Durant (4.5) and Adisa Isaac (4.0) are among the top 25 in the conference in tackles for loss. In fact, Penn State’s leading tackler through five games, Curtis Jacobs, has 11 fewer stops than the 25^th player on the conference tackles list, Michigan State’s Dillon Tatum, and 44 fewer than the Big Ten leader, Iowa’s Jay Higgins.

Why? Penn State’s defense simply doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field these days.

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Despite the insistence of some cantankerous columnists, Penn State hasn’t exactly shied away from facing their former archrival.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: If any of the charming folks who represent the Pitt fanbase online come across this week’s column, it will undoubtedly provoke some comments that they are living “rent free” in my head.

Don’t get it twisted; invited guests don’t have to pay rent.

I grew up with the Penn State-Pitt rivalry and remain steadfast in my nostalgia for intense battles played out in the late November chill. I’m writing this piece because Pittsburgh columnists setting Twitter ablaze with rhetorical Molotov cocktails and Penn Staters responding in kind is all in good fun.

To me, the gridiron animus between two great Pennsylvania universities symbolizes everything good about college football. If I had my druthers, the teams would play every year, ideally at the end of the regular season. Based on many in-person and virtual interactions with many Penn State alumni and fans over many years, I am confident that this puts me in the minority.

As far as I can tell, the number of Penn State fans who remember or care about a time when Pitt-Penn State belonged in the same conversation with Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State-Michigan, or Florida-Florida State dwindles with each passing year. The Nittany Lions are about to begin their fourth decade of membership in the ever-expanding Big Ten, and the prospect of future games against USC or Oregon generates much more excitement than the memory of dormant rivalries from the analog age. Today’s college seniors were born after 9/11. Games involving Tony Dorsett and Dan Marino mean little to them. Much of Nittany Nation has moved on.

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To quote novelist Charles Dickens, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…depending on what side of the number you were on.

Man, it had been a good 6 or 7 minutes since I saw something rile up and divide the always-sensible, level-headed Twitter/X community the way Penn State’s cleverly-designed, spread-covering 4^th quarter TD pop pass from backup Beau Pribula to backup Trey Potts did. Oh boy, you were either BIG mad…

Second time this year James Franklin has run up the score so Penn State covers the spread.. If I'm an opposing player/coach and someone pulls this (fake taking a knee) up 21.. There is going to be a price to pay. Classless! https://t.co/cX6HFH33Ov

— Cʜᴜᴄᴋ ᴅᴏᴜɢʟᴀs ✪ (@ChuckDouglas_) October 1, 2023

Or, um, whatever the opposite of BIG mad is (BIG happy?)…

Me when penn state hit the fake kneel to cover yesterday https://t.co/WJHj8lasa1

— The Franchise (@Kfrancis09) October 1, 2023

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As Penn State piled up points and yards against outmatched opposition during a 4-0 start, pundits and grumpy fans who needed to pick nits pointed to the lack of explosive plays from the offense, which didn’t get the Nittany Lions in much trouble against the soft early part of the schedule but did not seem to bode well for the tougher sledding ahead. At the time, especially given those insane victory margins, they seemed just that: nits to pick.

The Lions’ slow-start win at Northwestern, however, revealed the dirty little secret they’d done a pretty good job of keeping through the first month of the season:

This team is going to struggle to generate explosive offensive plays because it doesn’t have explosive playmakers.

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• Thanks to the 4^th Estate assigned to cover all the ins and outs/nooks and crannies/snaps crackles and pops of Penn State Football, we learned this week that the Gen Z Nittany Lions are huge fans of cranking the loud speakers up to 11 and blasting Phil Collins at practice. Who knew? Since that’s the case, might we suggest skipping the haunting tones of In The Air Tonight or sick synth beats of Sussudio and instead just play Land of Confusion on a continuous loop this week and next? Because no song title hits the nail on the head better when it comes to describing the current state of the Penn State offense.

• Yes, the Nittany Lions pushed their FBS-best streak of 30+ point games to 12 today. But it wasn’t easy. And it definitely wasn’t pretty. EVERYTHING THE OFFENSE DOES JUST SEEMS HARD. I don’t know how else to explain it. Zero flow. Zero rhythm. Zero consistency. Zero identity. As we wrote in our ‘Dial M For Methodical’ blog post earlier this week, “…like a disgruntled significant other who sat you down for one of those ‘We Need To Talk’ talks, it’s not just ONE thing. It’s a lot of things.’”

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It may not be quite what we all expected, but the 4-0 Nittany Lions are winning in an impressive fashion that will serve them well down the line.

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“I run six plays, split veer. It’s like Novocain. Just give it time, it always works.”

– Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, “Remember the Titans”

“There’s no greater feeling than to be able to move a man from Point A to Point B against his will.”

– NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Russ Grimm

“I feel like everybody would prefer to have the one- or two-play drive… But it is a different type of satisfaction when you’re out there, and you’re 10, 12, 15 plays in… because you feel like whatever you could do, they can’t stop it.”

– Penn State offensive guard Saleem Wormley

These are two of my favorite football quotes (even though the latter is from a Pitt alum – nobody’s perfect, after all – and the former is fiction) followed by a key member of the 2023 Nittany Lions summing up how it felt to smother the Iowa Hawkeyes with methodical brute force. Taken together, they form a kind of short story about the first quarter of Penn State’s season.

To the extent some fans worried or grumbled after the Lions took apart West Virginia on national television to open this year’s campaign, it can be traced to the ways in which a dominant 38-15 outing still fell short of expectations rooted in preseason hype. In the eight months that elapsed between Penn State’s Rose Bowl win over Utah and the end of Summer training camp, this year’s team had been built up so much in people’s minds that some folks seemed to be expecting to see the 1994 offense and 1986 defense paired together from the opening snap. When every pass rush didn’t result in a sack and every Nick Singleton carry a 60-yard scamper, there was a palpable sense of, “What gives?”

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Pat Fitzgerald grew up in Orland Park, a suburb just south of Chicago. He was an All-American middle linebacker at Northwestern in the high-shoulder pad era of the  mid-1990s, a tackle-to-tackle prowler who put a pair of Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year trophies in the Wildcats sparsely filled case. After his eligibility expired, he spent more than two decades coaching at his Alma Mater, 17 as the head coach. Jack Fitzgerald, Pat’s son, was about to start his freshman year playing TE for his proud papa.

All of this sounds like the first act of a movie, including the fact that Pat looks like Tony Soprano doing pretty well on his diet. Unfortunately, the fairytale story ended prematurely and without a happy ending.

Rumors of systemic hazing  bubbled over into full-blown allegations over the summer. Lawsuits from multiple parties are still pending but the school couldn’t afford to wait; Fitzgerald was fired in July, less than a month before the start of preseason practice, following the university’s investigation into the matter. It wasn’t quite losing a JoePa, but Fitzgerald was undisputedly the face of the Northwestern program.

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I’m not one of these sports savants who can describe in perfect detail a specific play from a Week Twelve game against Pitt in the mid-80’s. By the end of each football season, I pretty much delete those files from my human hard drive (a.k.a. my brain) to clear room for all of the day-to-day trivial gigabytes – passwords, family birthdays, answers to security questions like the middle name of my second-grade gym teacher – to survive from late January to late August.

There is one exception, though…weird weather games.

Not sure what it is, but there’s something about players flopping around in extreme rain, snow, wind, that just stinks in my memory. Heck, 60 years from now, when my no-good unborn children stick me in a senior assisted living facility (or God’s Waiting Room, as it’s also called) I’ll still be muttering about the 2007 Steelers-Dolphins Monday Night Mud Bowl and the Brandon Fields punt submerged in the slop…well, when I’m not screaming about the nurses stealing money.

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