This is rather foreboding

Michigan's struggling, one-dimensional offense heads to Happy Valley to take on a top-ten defense coming off a bye week. This projects to go not well, believe it or not.

This week's depressing choice for which game to break down: Penn State vs. Iowa. The Hawkeyes have the 80th-ranked offense in the country, per S&P+. Michigan is 76th. These offenses function similarly, running MANBALL schemes behind iffy O-lines with passing attacks held back by a lack of standout receivers (Michigan has better TEs, Iowa the superior QB). The Hawkeyes couldn't establish a consistent passing attack, so PSU was able to cheat up against the run and play with reckless abandon. That's depressingly familiar, as is this drive chart:

• five three-and-outs
• two first-down-and-outs
• two plays, -1 yards, safety after getting pinned deep by punt
• five plays, 52 yards, lost fumble
• five plays, 37 yards, missed field goal
• one-play, 21-yard touchdown drive after an interception
• three-play touchdown drives of 74 and 80 yards on their final two possessions when Akrum Wadley damn near singlehandedly won the game

When Wadley wasn't doing it all himself, Iowa had nothing. Michigan can scheme up some more creative stuff than Iowa, and despite the stuggling wideouts the Wolverines have more weapons across the board; unfortunately, they have a markedly worse quarterback and no Akrum Wadley. The Hawkeyes didn't record their second first down until less than five minutes remained in the first half.

Let's get this over with.

Personnel: Seth's diagram [click to embiggen]:

Penn State brought back a large portion of last year's 14th-ranked defense. The six returning starters displayed above undersells their experience. Senior corner Christian Campbell had six pass breakups last year while getting near-starter snaps; senior safety Troy Apke has appeared in every game since 2015 with a couple starts mixed in; SLB Koa Farmer played in every game last year with two starts, including the Rose Bowl; Shareef Miller and Ryan Buchholz combined for ten TFLs and five sacks in 2016 as rotation DEs.

Unsurprisingly, they're the 8th-ranked defense this year.

On the Michigan side, we've added a couple sore spots. You already know them. On the plus side, we've figured out who to put at running back.

Base Set? A versatile 4-3 with base personnel that generally stays on the field. Both outside linebackers, Koa Farmer and Manny Bowen, are capable in space (Farmer entered 2016 as a safety), so they'll usually slide over the slot instead of sitting for an extra defensive back. That's helped PSU make up for the offseason injury loss of slot corner John Reid.

When PSU does go nickel on obvious passing downs, they'll side Grant Haley into the slot and insert Amani Oruwariye at field corner.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the breakdown.]

Man or zone coverage? A healthy mix of both. PSU ran a lot of Cover 4 last year but they showed a lot of one-high looks (both Cover 1 and Cover 3) against Iowa, ostensibly to get run-stuffing safety Marcus Allen in the box, as well as a fair amount of Cover 2.

In addition to running a number of different coverages effectively, PSU is good at disguising them, especially when they can get exotic on third-and-longs. Here's one example:

PSU's alignment, with safety Marcus Allen all the way up at the line of scrimmage, makes it appear they'll run a three-deep blitz, and both inside linebackers show blitz at the snap. Instead, both linebackers back out into underneath zones, Allen takes the nearside flat, and the slot corner blitzes. The disguised Cover 2 blitz confused Iowa QB Nathan Stanley, who took a quick look downfield, didn't like his first read, and scrambled for a harmless gain of four.

Pressure: GERG or Greg? DC Brent Pry will dial up heat from all angles — six different non-linemen have been in on at least one sack this season even though PSU ranks just 78th in adjusted sack rate.

Dangerman: Well, damn. There's four and I was tempted to hand out a couple more.

Let's go front-to-back. Redshirt sophomore DE Shareef Miller had a monster game with two TFLs, including an impressive chasedown of Wadley for a safety:

That was, uh, not a good call, but also a very athletic play. Miller did a whole lot more than that; he put Stanley under pressure multiple times and was seemingly in on most of the blown-up runs at the line. The stats confirm Miller's run defense bona fides; his eight run stuffs are three more than any other PSU defender.

At the MIKE, leading tackler Jason Cabinda is rock-solid. He had one bad moment in this game when he turned Wadley loose on a wheel route that resulted in one of Iowa's late TDs. He was also largely responsible for holding Wadley down in the first place. Cabinda was able to aggressively play the run against Iowa, which let him put his best qualities on display—his ability to read-and-react, then fight through traffic to make tackles:

Penn State also boasts an impressive starting DT duo; moving the ball up the gut against them won't be easy.

I didn't pull any clips of cornerback Grant Haley because Iowa essentially refused to look in his direction. Given quarterbacks would be better off this year spiking the ball into the turf than throwing Haley's way, that wasn't a bad strategy:

How many weeks can Grant Haley stay atop this list of B1G CBs? pic.twitter.com/6r5bfnEjpY

— PFF College Football (@PFF_College) October 12, 2017

While Haley's undersized, Michigan no longer has a starting wideout who's going to make that matter much, and PSU boasts another corner on that list, Christian Campbell, who at 6'1" is well-equipped to cover larger receivers.

Finally, Marcus Allen is one of the best box safeties in the country; PSU will line him up all over the place, sometimes as an overhang edge-rusher on the LOS or even as a straight-up OLB. He's a great run defender and forceful tackler; he forced a Wadley fumble in this game by getting his helmet directly on the football. While he can be beat in coverage, Michigan's offense looks like one he'll thrive against—if you can't make him respect the pass, he's going to spend much of the game making plays at or behind the line of scrimmage.

OVERVIEW

This is an excellent starting defense that has plenty of depth, too. They appear to have what Michigan had last year: a true two-deep along the defensive line. I'm a big fan of the confusingly named DT pairing of Curtis Cothran and Parker Cothren, who have complementary skill-sets—the former is more of a one-gap attacker, the latter a stronger space-eater. PSU ran a lot of line slants that gave Iowa's line a ton of trouble. Here's a play on which Cothran (#52, near-side DT) slants hard, takes out two linemen, and opens up a gap that Miller fills with aplomb:

The bench is strong, too. Iowa didn't have any more success running at 300-pounders Tyrell Chavis and Robert Windsor. On passing downs, Penn State often plugs in redshirt sophomore Kevin Givens, a cat-quick 287-pounder who had 4.5 sacks in limited time a year ago. While he doesn't have a sack yet this year, he dusted an Iowa guard one-on-one to get a pressure on Stanley.

While the loss of Torrence Brown has hurt the pass-rush some, Miller's breakout season has helped cover for his absence, as has the emergence of redshirt freshman pass-rush specialist Shaka Toney. Toney had two sacks in PSU's most recent game against Northwestern and they were not flukes; he turned the corner on a speed rush at eight yards on one, and the other featured him staving off the left tackle with one arm before forcing a fumble:

At strongside end, Ryan Buchholz is another who's better defending the run than generating a pass-rush on his own. He held up well aside from Iowa's final drive, when PSU got cute and tried to align him at DT; he got blown out to open the hole for Wadley's go-ahead touchdown.

As a group, this is literally a very strong D-line, one very capable of resetting the LOS in the backfield (see above). The PSU DL is third nationally in havoc rate despite a relative dearth of sacks.

That makes life easy on Cabinda, who doesn't often have to take on blockers when flowing to the play. The outside linebackers, Manny Bowen and Koa Farmer, are relatively interchangeable; Farmer is the bigger player despite being the former safety and both are comfortable in the box or in space. Going to the perimeter against this defense is difficult in large part because they're both fast to flow to the ball (and fast, period).

The secondary is tough to crack. Haley has been a lockdown corner this year. His counterpart, Campbell, has been nearly as good. Campbell also impressed against Iowa in run support; he held the edge very well and forced Wadley to find space between the tackles. While nickel Amani Oruwariye wasn't really needed in this game, I've liked what I've seen from him this year, too.

Both safeties are seniors, and while they're each a little limited in coverage—Allen is a little stiff while Troy Apke isn't the greatest athlete—they're usually in the right spots. Big passing plays against PSU have been very hard to come by. Iowa got two chunk plays on the defensive backs, one when Campbell was hit with a questionable DPI flag after running a streak into the sideline, the other when Apke got outjumped for a 21-yard touchdown. Those didn't come easy and the rest of the game they had zilch.

Unless the offense looks drastically different, they're going to have a very difficult time stringing together positive plays. That doesn't mean it's entirely hopeless, though. Iowa had that very problem but still nearly pulled out a win with a couple chunk plays, none bigger than when they caught PSU in a blitz and hit Wadley on a wheel: 

#4 is a backup, so he's probably irrelevant, unfortunately

Michigan is going to need similar plays to hit big; they're not going to be able to line up and out-execute PSU. I highly recommend watching this video from B/R's Michael Felder, who highlights five ways—most of them utilizing misdirection—that M can crack PSU's defense:

Michigan's got an uphill battle to score vs Penn St. 5 things I'm looking to see the Wolverines work in if they are to pull the upset pic.twitter.com/mYQQ4xLChj

— Michael Felder (@InTheBleachers) October 19, 2017

I'll add one more: PSU had some issues leaving receivers open on short passes over the middle, but Iowa had a couple ugly drops that prevented them from taking advantage. It's worth seeing if Michigan can spring someone on concepts like mesh.