Three Takeaways from Penn State Football’s big Rose Bowl win

1. Penn State will be a force running the ball

Utah came into the Rose Bowl allowing just 107 rush yards per game with an average of 3.8 yards per attempt. These are pretty solid numbers.

Penn State was able to surpass those numbers though, rushing for 169 yards for the game with an average of 5.5 yards per attempt. Now, roughly half of this came on Nick Singleton’s 87-yard run, but it still counts.

While these are not eye-opening numbers for a college game, Singleton and his fellow freshman running back Kaytron Allen showed a lot of promise in year one.

In the Rose Bowl specifically, Singleton had 120 yards and two touchdowns on just seven carries. Allen’s night was a little more difficult, with 34 yards and a touchdown on 11 carries, but he did a lot of things well in pass protection as well.

The main takeaway is though, these two are only true freshmen. Penn State is going to have them for at least the next two seasons. And while injuries are impossible to project, and you hope they’re avoided; this duo should get better and stronger and wiser each year.

We saw Saquon Barkley, Miles Sanders and Journey Brown all get gradually better as their careers went on, there’s no reason to believe these two won’t follow the same path.

Drew Allar may get all the hype going in 2023, but the Nittany Lions should be a run first team with this duo in the backfield.