Dispatches from Beaver Stadium following the Kent State game, aka the Liam Clifford Breakout Party …

First off all, it should be noted once again that the Nittany Lions are both at fault and not at fault for the level of opponent. College football schedules, for reasons known only to Mark Emmert and the CIA, are put together several years in advance. And they do get a pass for the pandemic wreaking particular havoc on this particular opponent scheduling. But while Penn State couldn’t have known the Golden Flashes would be this bad in 2024, they had to figure they weren’t going to be great. But hey, Kent State gets its paycheck, Penn State gets a dub heading into the Big Ten season, and on we go.

I don’t think the Nittany Lions played particularly well, nor were they particularly bad. They arguably could have beaten this Kent State team — even before it lost its top two quarterbacks to injuries — by 30 or 40 points with a random mix of first- and second-stringers playing the entire game. At least initially, they didn’t look particularly crisp on offense, and the defense continued its early season trend of silly penalties, including a couple more neutral zone infractions.

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Ah, yes, the week 3 bye. A chance to reflect on all we’ve learned about Penn State through the first two games, which is to say: Not much. Are the Nittany Lions the balanced bullies we saw in Morgantown or the flawed playoff pretenders that scratched out a one-possession win over a middling Bowling Green team at home? Or, perhaps, something completely different than either of those two versions?

We won’t know for a few more weeks. But there were a few things that hinted at what the Lions’ immediate future might look like, and a few that are unlikely to stay that way, good or bad, for the remainder of the year.

3 THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER

Third-down struggles: Yes, Penn State’s third-down conversion rate (35%, 94th in FBS) is mildly disturbing when you consider it hasn’t exactly faced world-beating defenses, and if that trend continues, it will mean fewer plays for the offense to be on the field and more plays for a suddenly suspect defense to have to be on the field. However, this is a small sample size, and third-down conversion rate, while not something you want to disregard entirely, is not a be-all, end-all statistic. Why? If you can pick up first downs, or even big, chunky, sexy touchdowns, on first or second down, there’s no need to convert on third. The Nittany Lions have, thanks to their crafty coordinator and a revitalized Drew Allar, more explosive punch than we’ve seen recently (more on this in a bit), and have shown the ability to score points despite the third-down misfires. Expect this stat to improve a bit as the season progresses but also for the offense to deliver the chunk plays that will mitigate it even if it doesn’t.

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Andy Kotelnicki’s most-interesting plat design might have occurred on the Nittany Lions first play from scrimmage, launching Penn State TE Tyler Warren toward a school record.

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There were a multitude of plays worth writing about from Saturday, partially due to the fact that Bowling Green’s offense kept Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki from shutting off his brain in an unexpectedly competitive start-to-finish contest. Several of those clever concepts concluded with the ball in the sure hands of 44-Tyler Warren…including the Nittany Lions first play from scrimmage – an Unbalanced Arrow RPO.

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So, uh, 1-0?

Penn State put together all the ingredients for a feel-good Saturday after an occasionally sloppy but largely impressive opening win at West Virginia: a beautiful, sunny September afternoon, a MAC opponent they should handle without much difficulty, and a large home crowd full of fans who were ready to be optimistic about this team’s long-term chances, and perhaps drink a $12 beer or three.

Instead, the Nittany Lions learned some hard truths about themselves, the first and most significant being that the perceived easier path to the expanded playoff won’t matter much if they don’t figure some things out along that path the next few weeks, and the second being, for the first time in a while, that most of those things concerned the defense.

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