Sunday Column: Confidence, Not Talent, Will Determine Penn State’s Offensive Fate in 2024… And It Starts With One Man

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The most important person on the Penn State football team in 2024 isn’t Drew Allar.

It’s not Nick Singleton.

It’s not super-jacked linebacker-turned defensive end Abdul Carter, nor prodigal son wide receiver Julian Fleming.

It’s not James Franklin.

No, the one guy who will have the most influence on whether the Nittany Lions finally return to the national championship summit, make the elusive first playoff appearance, or have another so-so, ho-hum 10-3 campaign is Andy Kotelnicki, the new offensive coordinator.

Now, he’s going to need a lot of help, from all of the guys mentioned above, plus returning starters like Kaytron Allen and Tyler Warren and KJ Winston, and guys stepping into larger roles like Dani Dennis-Sutton and Drew Shelton and Tony Rojas, and from the other new coordinators, Tom Allen and Justin Lustig, and from strength coach Chuck Losey and his staff, and … you get it. Ultimate team sport, lots of moving parts, calories to consume and playbooks to study etc. etc.

But Kotelnicki is gonna be the guy that makes it go or doesn’t. And which of those outcomes will occur will boil down to his ability to do what the offensive coordinators preceding him haven’t been able to do, which is put it all together.

Since Joe Moorhead and Saquon Barkley and Trace McSorley and Ricky Rahne left town, the Nittany Lions have been building their raw offensive talent, to the point where they’ve had as much of it the last two or three seasons as they’ve ever had under Franklin and as much as they’ve had in all but a handful of other junctures in program history. The quarterback room has gotten more skilled. The tight ends continue to get bigger and stronger while staying just as athletic (see Johnson, Theo, at the NFL Combine). Even the offensive line, long the sore thumb on otherwise powerful figurative blue-and-white hands in State College, has been getting deeper and quietly turning out some polished prospects. The wide receivers, the 2023 season from hell aside, have been mostly dynamic and reliable.

But all of that hasn’t been enough to get them past or even with Michigan and Ohio State, and that’s because that offensive talent has not performed to its collective potential on a consistent basis. The whole has not added up to the sum of the parts, at least not when it has truly mattered. You can’t put all of that on Kirk Ciarrocca and Mike Yurcich, who have succeeded at other places and probably will again, and, even if you really want to, you can’t put that much of it on Franklin, who has been more of a taster than a chef in the offensive kitchen. There has been something missing from this group, and while the defense has been tearing apart mediocre opponents and (usually) holding its own against the bullies on the schedule, the offense has been stopping and starting against the former and collapsing on the side of the road against the latter.

Kotelnicki will be tasked with providing more explosive plays, both in the passing game and in the running game. He’ll have to find ways to get creative with touches for Singleton and Allen, who will remain the best playmakers on the offense until someone wrestles that title away from them. He will probably have to make do with a receiving core that, the addition of Fleming aside, might not be much if any more robust in 2024 than it was in 2023.

But although all of that is important and ultimately his responsibility, none of it will mean as much as establishing a collective confidence and belief among the unit that, no matter the situation, the offense and the team itself are only a few plays away from paydirt. The best offenses Penn State has had (1994, 2005, 2016) have had that sort of swagger, the sort that comes from being on the same page, of trusting that the guy next to you will deliver and that the plays you’re running will work, because they’ve always worked. Recent Penn State offenses have had neither the confidence nor the competency that fuels that confidence, and again, while not all of that falls at Kotelnicki’s feet, he is the person best positioned to build the system that can allow that confidence to grow.

If he can get Allar and his backs and his rebuilt line and Warren and yes, the wide receivers, to learn and feel good about his offense, and give them a few plays or packages they can execute with precision, you’ll see that confidence start to build, and it’ll be that confidence that gets them over the big-game humps that have been too much for this offense to climb. They won’t have to be perfect—even if a defense that lost a bunch of big names and has its own learning curve to face takes an expected step back—but if they believe that they can be perfect on any given play, the talent will start to show itself. And then, for the first time in a long time, the Penn State offense could go from bunch of guys with great potential to a well-oiled machine that simply gets it done, over and over again, until the game is over and it’s time to ring the bell in the south end zone.

No pressure, Andy.