Penn State football: Grading Sean Clifford’s performance so far
Penn State football quarterback Sean Clifford is now three games into his starting career. How has he been so far?
Throughout the summer, we’ve heard about how much Penn State football would miss their All-Time passing leader, Trace McSorley. Obviously, nobody was going to deny that fact as he’s created such an impact over the last few years he’s been under center for the Nittany Lions.
But life goes on in the NCAA and change is inevitable. This year, we thought the torch would get passed off to Tommy Stevens, but the now Mississippi State quarterback had other plans. With his sudden transfer, that forced Penn State to look at two young quarterbacks for the starting job in redshirt sophomore Sean Clifford and freshman passer, Will Levis.
As we know, Clifford’s slight experience won him the job in the end. It took weeks of preseason practice for James Franklin and company to figure it out, but it turns out that Clifford was the guy for the job. Now that Clifford is three games in sitting on his first bye week, how has the Penn State passer done so far in his starting debut?
Grading Sean Clifford’s performance so far
His first start against Idaho was nerve-wracking. For the first couple of series’, Sean Clifford didn’t look so hot. Once he settled in though, the rest of his afternoon was a cakewalk. Idaho isn’t a tough opponent by any means, but Clifford dominated their defense as he was expected to.
When it came to Buffalo, the matchup wasn’t as easy. Although Penn State won by a nice margin, in the end, the Nittany Lions were off to quite a slow start. Eventually, they got it together, though. The following week against Pitt, now that was a close one.
We saw a similar start as the Buffalo matchup in the Pitt game for Clifford, but he never actually put it all together in the end. Pitt was Penn State’s toughest opponent to date, and that happened to be Clifford’s worst game. Quite a telling factor as of right now.
Through three weeks, Clifford has thrown 75 passes. He has completed 44 of the passes (58.7-percent) for 781 yards and six touchdowns. Those stats are decent, but his most impressive number to date is zero interceptions. As a first time starter, not turning the ball over at all through multiple weeks is a substantial accomplishment.
Clifford’s passing hasn’t been bad — but it could be a lot better. As we’ve seen against Pitt, his deep ball needs work. With a speedy wideout like KJ Hamler getting open down the field, Clifford needs to be able to get the ball to him. As he mentioned last week, he needs to hit his shots.
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The pros so far for Clifford would be no turnovers, and surprisingly productive in the run game as that was a significant question mark surrounding him before the season started. The cons would be that Clifford is leaving meat on the bone on drives with inaccurate passes.
He could be doing a lot better, but so far his production has been promising. If we had to grade him out through three weeks, we would say that Clifford’s showing has been a B-minus. He’s slightly above average, but nothing over the top. Over the next few weeks we will see what Clifford truly has to offer to Penn State as the matchups get more robust.