Sunday Column: Lightning strikes again and again in Morgantown – and that’s a good omen for Lions

Sometimes college football games — especially the season-openers — can feel as if they’re taking forever. In some cases, when you get a two-hour weather delay, that feeling is multiplied by a hundred.

In their much-anticipated debut under the crafty guidance of Andy Kotelnicki in Saturday’s game at West Virginia, and in the midst of a five-hour and 45-minute affair that checked both of the boxes above, Drew Allar and the Penn State offense needed only a handful of plays that lasted a handful of seconds to dispatch a fired-up group of Mountaineers and their, um, endearing fan base, and in the process feed Lion fans watching there and at home with some needed optimism.

On paper, the 2024 offense isn’t much different than the 2023 version; if anything, it’s worse. The offensive line is rebuilding, the group of reliable receiving options appears to be entirely composed of Tre Wallace, the dynamic tight end due of Theo Johnson and Tyler Warren is now just Warren, and Drew Allar and Beau Pribula are still doing the QB shuffle that seems to be as much of a threat to the offense’s own rhythm as it is to the defense.

But football is not played on paper, and one of the beautiful things about the game is just one or two tweaks — a breakout performance from a key starter, a confidence-building touchdown drive late in a big game, a player who doesn’t usually mix things up trucking a so-called tough guy on the other team—can change the entire dynamic of a drive or a game or a season.

What Saturday showed, after only a few series, was that the addition of Kotelnicki to this group has also meant the potential addition of enough tweaks to fill all the seats and suites in Beaver Stadium (pre- and post-renovations).

This is not a perfect offense and it isn’t going to be. It might not even wind up as a great offense. Allar lost a fumble after appearing to not be ready for one of several eyebrow-raising snaps from new center Nick Dawkins. The reshuffled line had trouble opening many interior holes against a West Virginia front that is not going to be anywhere close to many of the fronts Penn State will face this season. Allar showed some nice pocket escapability but had to evade pressure too many times. And, aside from a massive 55-yard reception from Omari Evans just before the half, Lion receivers other than Wallace were basically just doing cardio.

And yet, you could forgive or forget all of that stuff, because once it stopped putting the football on the ground, that offense consistently found opportunities for big plays and cashed in on them. Big strikes in the intermediate and deep passing game. Home-run bursts from home-run specialist Nick Singleton. Beautifully designed plays that had receivers running wide open, a sight rarely seen in any Penn State game in 2023. This is Kotelnicki’s modus operandi, and it didn’t take him long at all to show the effect he’s going to have, and already has had, on the entire team.

Now, we must remember that Allar also cooked West Virginia’s defense a year ago to the tune of 11.2 yards per attempt, 325 yards passing and three touchdowns. But the way in which Penn State’s, uh, lightning strikes came this year felt different, didn’t it? Allar knew where he was going with the football but the defense didn’t, not until it was too late. By the time Penn State hits the meat of the Big Ten schedule, the defenses it’s playing against will not only be better but will have plenty of tape on this offense’s schemes, its tendencies and its inevitable soft spots. As the Nittany Lions displayed, though, it only takes a handful of plays to put four or five touchdowns on the board, not the soul-sucking methodical 12-play drives that the Lions relied on for most of the last few years. Not even the best defensive coordinators and the best defenses can stop a truly explosive offense for four quarters.

The West Virginia game turned out to be the high-water mark for the offense in 2023. Kotelnicki and Allar must not let the same thing happen this year. What they showed Saturday hinted that the surface is only being scratched, that they now have not only the personnel necessary for explosive plays but also the functional fuses necessary to create those explosions. The offense has a lot of work ahead of it if it’s going to be able to pull off these kinds of plays on a regular basis against the better teams on the schedule. Even a semi-regular basis, though, would be a lot more than what they managed a year ago.