Sunday Column: Offense Reaches Another Gear, but Transmission Still a Little Sticky

Week One was a nail-biter. Week Two was a nail-filer.

Penn State wasted little time making a very good MAC team look like a very weak MAC team Saturday in front of the largest home-opener crowd in 13 years, finding the offensive firepower to match another dominant defensive performance in a 44-13 waxing of Ball State. The Nittany Lions out-gained the Cardinals 493-295, won the turnover battle 2-0 and didn’t allow a touchdown until the defensive starters had already called it a day midway through the fourth quarter.

For the second straight week, Sean Clifford had a clean game, completing a high percentage of his passes, none to the other team, and accounted for a pair of touchdowns. The run game, stymied last week by a savage Wisconsin front seven, put 43 yards on the stat sheet on the game’s opening drive and nearly 200 more over the next 55 minutes. Ten receivers caught at least one pass and four of them had at least one grab of 20-plus yards.

It was, in almost every way, the sort of afternoon coaches and fans dream about — pristine September weather, a fired-up and live-football-starved crowd of over 105,000, and a comfortable win that allowed the starters to build confidence and backups to get some well-deserved game reps. And it wasn’t against an FCS opponent, either; Ball State brought 18 starters back from a team that had gone 7-1 last year, including its first bowl victory, and had picked up a win in its first game last week as well.

The key word in that previous graph, though, is “almost.” At several different points during the afternoon, the Nittany Lions walked right up to the line between dominant and nearly dominant, stuck a toe over it, then took a step or two backward, only to return again a possession or two later. Too many times, an offense that was gobbling up yards on almost every snap stalled out in the red zone. The game at hand was never in doubt, at least not after Clifford punched it in from a yard out with just under six minutes left in the first to make it 14-0, but after that it often felt as though the offense was leaving meat on the bone. After the first two drives produced 154 yards and two touchdowns, the nine drives that followed produced 339 yards and … two touchdowns, including backup Ta’Quan Roberson’s 23-yard strike to Theo Johnson late in the fourth.

It was, of course, a far more complete performance for Mike Yurcich’s crew than the game in Madison, which Penn State basically won in spite of its offense. And Yurcich and his staff deserve much of the credit, calling a balanced game that kept Clifford out of harm’s way and let Penn State’s playmakers do their thing, all while saving plenty of material for future contests, including next week’s wildly anticipated bout against Auburn.

What last week and, to a lesser extent, this week, revealed, however, was that Yurcich’s playcalling, Penn State’s offensive rhythm, and the team’s overall ceiling are, at least for the moment, limited by what has been inconsistent play from both Clifford and the offensive line.

Now, inconsistent is a word that gets used in a multitude of contexts, and it’s also a quite relative term. Find a college football team that doesn’t show any inconsistency — particularly in September — and you’re probably standing in Bryant-Denny Stadium. But put aside for a moment Clifford’s inconsistent mechanics (his ability to throw from a variety of platforms continues to be both impressive and maddening) and focus on the stats alone: He completed 12 of his first 13 pass attempts, eight(!!) of them for first downs. He went on to complete 9 of his final 16 attempts, with four for first downs. The overall numbers were fine, and he didn’t even sniff a pick (which wasn’t the case in Madison), but there were plays left on the field against a defense that had surrendered 8.2 yards per attempt and 367 passing yards overall to Western Illinois the week prior.

The performance of the line in both the run and the pass game was similarly confounding. Again, the overall numbers were good, but the average of 5.0 yards per rush drops to 4.2 if you subtract Clifford’s 43-yard scramble, and only some hard leg-driving by Noah Cain and some fancy footwork by Keyvone Lee saved a few other runs from going for losses. Most of Clifford’s incomplete passes were heavily influenced by heavy pressure from a Ball State defense that got more aggressive as the game went on but rarely paid for it.

With the talent Penn State has in the backfield, at tight end and especially at wide receiver, and with Yurcich’s ability to change tempo and identify the soft, fleshy areas of a defense, the Nittany Lions are going to move the ball this season — that’s a near-certainty. And we saw progress from the first week to the second week, which you want to see from any team but certainly one that punted on eight of its 12 possessions in the opener.

What will determine this team’s ceiling, though, won’t be Clifford’s completion percentage or even his continued turnover avoidance but his ability to connect with Jahan Dotson or Parker Washington on key 3^rd-and-mediums. It won’t be the final yards per carry of Cain or Lee but the ability of the offensive line to clear a path for them on a crucial 3^rd-and-goal. It’ll be the ability of Yurcich to know which buttons to press in those situations and others like them while continuing to draft game plans that put pressure on the defense but keep it off his quarterback and his offensive line. Doing all three at once — ahem — consistently in a conference like the Big Ten isn’t easy, if it’s even possible.

The defense, even minus Ellis Brooks in the first half, came to play on Saturday, and came close to out-scoring Ball State by itself (take a bow, Jesse Luketa). Aside from a badly pulled 45-yard field-goal try from Jordan Stout (who drilled his other attempts), so did the special teams. The offense made perhaps the largest improvement of the three units from Week 1 to Week 2, but with every two plays that gave reason for optimism, there seemed to be one that gave reason to keep that optimism guarded.

Was it a comfortable win against a solid opponent? Certainly. And yet, it also left just enough hints that Wisconsin probably won’t be the only nail-biter on Penn State’s schedule this fall.