Penn State didn’t look great in its 27-9 Week 2 win over Temple, but as real as concerns about the run game and run defense are for Matt Campbell’s Nittany Lions, a strong second half and his veteran quarterback’s postgame message to ESPN’s Morgan Uber, who reported from the sidelines in Philadelphia, should stop fans short of hitting the panic button.
“It’s our first road game as a team,” Becht began. “We came out hot; we just weren’t able to execute in the red zone, and we made adjustments after the first quarter and at halftime. We were able to come back and rally around one another to be better than that first quarter.”
It’s overly simplistic, but if Penn State cashed in on its first two trips inside the Temple 10-yard line in the first quarter, the entire complexion of this game changes. Instead, Ryan Barker missed a 33-yard chip-shot field goal, and after a Tony Rojas interception, the offense was stuffed on fourth down.
Neither of those developments is a positive takeaway for Penn State, but coming away with zero points on those two drives is an incredibly unlikely outcome. And it was an outcome that skewed the halftime score and the final score to look much closer than the game was on the field.
Penn State was far from perfect but still good enough to keep everything on the table
Penn State hasn’t tested itself in the non-conference in recent seasons, but you can still glean something from three games against non-Power 4 teams. Last season, it was clear that Penn State didn’t look sharp even in blowout wins over Nevada, FIU, and Villanova.
This year, two-thirds of the way through, Penn State has looked sharp enough on both sides of the ball to believe that 11-1 and 10-2 are still plausible outcomes with the soft Big Ten slate upcoming.
Penn State didn’t dominate on a down-to-down basis in Week 2. By net success rate, the Nittany Lions were just +6%. Offensive coordinator Taylor Mouser’s run game finished at -0.10 EPA/carry while Temple produced 0.29 EPA/rush, which is an 89th-percentile performance.
The way Campbell has built this team, with tight ends all over the place and massive defensive tackles in the middle, the run game should be a strength for the offense and defense alike. That it hasn’t been is concerning, but not alarming, because Rocco Becht has carried the offense with a crisp passing game, and the defense has more than enough talent in the secondary to allow defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn to get more aggressive if he needs to allocate more resources at the line of scrimmage.
If you look at offensive EPA/play, it looks as lopsided as the game was supposed to look on the scoreboard. It didn’t get there because of some early red zone struggles against an unfamiliar defense. Becht understands that, and so should Penn State fans.
It wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t pretty, but Penn State wasn’t supposed to be an unbeatable juggernaut this season. Its CFP hopes are primarily predicated on the easy schedule, and though Michigan looks much better after beating No. 11 Oklahoma on Saturday, that schedule hasn’t changed.
Add us as a preferred source on Google