drew allar

At long last, a real team! After nine long weeks of drab opposition whose offensive FFFFs amounted to "will they move the ball? No", we finally have an opposing offense on tap that is mildly interesting. Of course, the Penn State offense haven't been world-beaters this season, apparent to anyone who watched the Ohio State-Penn State game live, but they are more talented and have far more weapons than any offense on the schedule previously. Get excited! 

The Film: There's a very obvious game to go with here, the OSU-PSU game. Ohio State is one of the two best defenses that Penn State has faced so far and it is a far more recent game than the Iowa matchup, which was in late September. That made it an easy choice, but I also am going to drop a few clips in from the most recent performance for PSU against Maryland, as it was the Nittanys' best offensive showing of the season. 

Personnel: Click for big. 

Penn State's QB for this contest is Drew Allar, a 5* true sophomore out of Medina, Ohio. Allar's arrival at the helm of the offense was much hyped this season after spending the 2022 campaign studying under Sean Clifford. Allar played a few snaps in garbage time against Michigan last season, but this will be the first time since 2018 that anyone other than Clifford starts for PSU against Michigan. Allar is a big kid with a big arm whose season has been defined by a remarkably low average depth of target and general inconsistency. He will feature heavily in this piece. 

The Nittany Lions return their two blue chip backs from last season, Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton. These two players were true freshmen last season when they edged past more experienced players to gobble up carries and this year they've owned the backfield all to themselves. Minnesota transfer Tre Potts is the nominal 3rd back, but he has just 20 carries to Allen and Singleton's combined 240. Of those 240, there's a near even split: Singleton has 121 and Allen has 119. The general consensus among PSU fans is that Allen's the more natural runner, backed up by his YPC clip of 4.8 to Singleton's 4.0. Both are talented players but their success on the ground has been constrained by anemic run blocking. 

If there's one area of this offense that looks very different from your typical Penn State squad under James Franklin, it's the receiver group. The closest thing to the level of receiver star PSU once had is the Dangerman for this piece, KeAndre Lambert-Smith. KLS is a good player, but I liked him more on last year's PSU squad, when the Lions had two other talented receivers to pair with him in Washington and Mitchell Tinsley. This year KLS is the only show in town, 51 catches for 645 yards while the next closest receiver of any kind has 24 catches and 246 yards. 

The other wide receivers besides KLS are particularly lacking, as the #2 and #3 receivers by catches/yardage are both TEs. The next two WRs on the depth chart below Lambert-Smith are Kent State transfer Dante Cephas and Harrison Wallace III, both of whom are extremely "meh". Dig deeper and it gets even thinner, with FSU transfer Malik McClain and Liam Clifford (brother of Sean) making next to no impact this season. Clifford played a decent bit in the game I charted and I felt he was dreadful. 

In the absence of supporting cast help for Lambert-Smith, PSU has been forced to play out of 12 personnel often this season, leaning on starting TEs Theo Johnson and Tyler Warren. Johnson, one-time blue chip recruit that Michigan sought after out of Windsor, Ontario, has not made the leap many hoped for, with subpar PFF grades across the board and a negligible impact in the team's biggest game to date (against OSU). Warren has been a multi-year blocking TE, forced into receiving duty this season with more catches in 2023 than he had in 2021-22 combined. PSU rarely ever uses a TE beyond these two, but if they do it's Khalil Dinkins. 

It's hard to discuss the PSU Offense's performance this season without honing in on the offensive line. After much offseason chatter about how Penn State would FINALLY HAVE A GOOD OFFENSIVE LINE, the bluster has (surprise!) not come to pass. LT Olu Fashanu has gotten considerable NFL hype but so far has only showcased that ability as a pass-blocker. At RT there may be the single biggest surprise of this OL, Caedan Wallace is not cyan'd after two straight seasons of doing so. The veteran appears to have improved by some amount, as he was not in the bottom two PSU OL against Ohio State (his PFF grades are solid too). However, is it really a good thing if Caedan Wallace is not one of your worst OL?  

I would say no, because the interior of the line looks real sketchy. Following in the theme of the tackles, push on the interior in the run game has been close to nonexistent. Sal Wormley gets the cyan at RG, while the tandem of JB Nelson/Olaivavega Iaone at LG do as well. In defense of Nelson/Iaone, they are filling in after Landon Tengwall hung up his cleats and decided to medically retire in late August, forcing these two reserves into a competition to fill one spot on the line. Center Hunter Nourzad, a one-time Cornell transfer, narrowly avoids the cyan, but he was put on skates numerous times by the defensive tackles of Ohio State. As for reserves, if PSU needs a third tackle, Drew Shelton is the guy

[AFTER THE JUMP: less words more video!]

You know what time of year it is... football content season!! No, not recruiting. Actual. Football. Fall camp begins tomorrow for the Michigan Wolverines and as the bell rings in football season, it's time to begin posting preview content on MGoBlog. The Enemy, Ranked is back for another season and as always, we're starting with the QB position. In contrast to last season, where most B1G opponents had returning QBs we were already familiar with, this season it's primarily new faces. Scratch that, a lot of new faces. Only two teams on the schedule are returning a QB who started a majority of games for them the previous season(!), three if you count Rutgers, who returns multiple QBs that combined to start the majority of games. Everyone's wearing nametags for our purposes, be it underclassmen moving up to starter or transfers who have been added to the roster. So let's get to know the opposing signal callers besides Taulia, who we already know: 

12. Indiana

The Indiana Hoosiers have yet another new QB (will have a new starter for the fourth straight year vs. Michigan) and it doesn't figure to be any of the three players who started for them last year. Jack Tuttle is now a Michigan Wolverine, Connor Bazelak is elsewhere on this list, and Dexter Williams' is still recovering from a torn ACL. Thus, the competition is between Tennessee transfer Tayven Jackson (younger brother of Trayce Jackson-Davis) and Brendan Sorsby, who was in the program last season, buried on the depth chart. Jackson was the higher rated recruit, a top 250 4* in the 2022 class, while Sorsby was a Who Dat 3* in that same class, making it a dynamic not unlike what we see with a certain team on this list in the green and white. The difference in this case being that the two candidates are in the same class, but the higher rated recruit is a transfer. 

As of right now, the sense is that this will be a battle that lasts through fall camp, perhaps all the way up to the season opener against Ohio State. Neither player has any experience to speak of, so it's tough to get a feel for what's going on here. Most expect it'll be Jackson because of the recruiting ratings, but I wouldn't be 100% certain. Either way, I don't really trust Indiana's coaching staff to get much out of their options and with so little experience + a choice between a talented newcomer and an untalented returner, I am very down on IU's QB situation. Maybe there's room for hope but I haven't seen any of these guys play and since Walt Bell is still the OC, they're going to be throwing screens the whole game anyway. Don't expect much production out of Indiana's QBs this year. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: this list gets less grim (eventually)?]

I haven't done a mailbag since January, so it was about time to take questions from all you fine people. I put a post up on the board late last week soliciting questions and then spent the weekend answering them. There were a lot of good ones and some of the responses got really long, so I decided to break this summer mailbag into two pieces, one today and one tomorrow, answering as many questions as I can.  

We’ve been spoiled with excellent and seasoned kicking and punting for a while now.  What can reasonably be considered “success” in kicking and punting this year? (-milk-n-steak) 

This was the first and most up-voted comment in the thread on the board, so people clearly have a clamoring for special teams talk. Jake Moody and Brad Robbins are out the door, making things very interesting on special teams this fall. As we stand right now, Tommy Doman is the likely punter and Louisville transfer James Turner is the likely kicker, though Adam Samaha could challenge Turner in fall camp. We all know that punting/kicking will very likely be worse this year, but how much worse should the reasonable goal be?. 

Part of the equation with this position is how much specialist play hinges on high leverage moments. Take for example Noah Ruggles, one of the nation's best kickers for several years in a row but who missed the kick that would've put Ohio State over Georgia and thus (likely) handed them a national title. Would anyone in Buckeye-land say that kicking was a "success" last year after that? You can say the same thing with Michigan's 2015 punting, which was very good in the macro view but because of [REDACTED], can you say it was a "success"? 

With all that in mind, I think "success" for kicking is near-perfect precision on FGs inside 40 and extra points. That's been Turner's speciality at Louisville and those are the sort of kicks you expect college kickers to make. PATs in particular have been so automatic for Michigan the last few years it's almost hard to remember Quinn Nordin and his knack for shanking them at the worst possible moments. If Turner (or Samaha) is 1) dead-on on those makeable kicks, 2) is somewhere around the national average on 40+, and 3) doesn't cost Michigan a game with a high leverage miss, that's a comprehensive success for me. 

As for punting, we already got a bit of a glimpse into a less robust punting game after Brad Robbins'(apparent) injury last season, when his play declined considerably late in the year. I wouldn't say he was an outright liability at that point, but it was becoming a worryspot. Thus, there's an obvious place to put the peg for "success" with Tommy Doman: he doesn't have to be as good as healthy Brad Robbins, but needs to be better than injured Brad Robbins. Doman doesn't have to be a Bryce Baringer rocket launcher, but if his punts have the hangtime to limit big returns and have enough distance to be worth it from a field position standpoint (+no high leverage shanks), that's "success" for me. In other words, kicking/punting success doesn't include being a top five specialist tandem again, but they need to be somewhat above average and *consistent* to qualify. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: How real is PSU? Recruiting???? 2024????]