Notebook: After win, Penn State football plays a second type of game

Penn State easily held Villanova in check Saturday afternoon at Beaver Stadium, emerging with a 38-17 win while finding a series of necessary improvements to build upon.

Postgame news, notes, and observations from No. 6 Penn State’s 38-17 win against the Villanova Wildcats:

Making too much of the statistics of any game between a program of Penn State’s stature against an FCS opponent in Villanova would be disingenuous.

But the reality of the improvements made by the Nittany Lion defense from last season to now deserves another look and, given the attention Penn State’s offensive performance demanded Saturday, a bigger nod than what it initially got.

Yes, the final score read 38-17 at Beaver Stadium, but Penn State’s performance through three quarters offers a striking look at just how effective the Nittany Lions were when playing their best.

Holding Villanova to just 1.2 yards per carry on the ground, Penn State was dominant stopping the run and, for Wildcats quarterback Daniel Smith, the Nittany Lion secondary also posed serious problems. Landing one interception and holding the opponent to just 10 completions on 23 attempts, Penn State again demonstrated the unit-wide buy-in that has permeated the program since the offseason.

“The biggest thing is we got to play in the framework of the defense, and that's something that we've been able to do so far,” defensive end Arnold Ebiketie said. “We're just thinking about doing what we're supposed to do. We're going to make plays and everything won't fall apart.”

Ebiketie is an interesting case study to this end.

Not even a part of the program when the Nittany Lion “framework of the defense” became a major talking point, there is no question that role responsibility and accountability has not only been drilled into every head on that side of the ball but it has also been eaten up by the players themselves.

The terminology itself drew an immediate smirk from Penn State head coach James Franklin.

Asked by a veteran reporter about believing in “mental health days” following a performance in which Franklin acknowledged the program didn’t necessarily have the “edge” he’d sought, the head coach patiently digested the rest of the question. Then, he made something of a self-deprecating remark about himself having a “psychology degree from the Harvard of the PSAC, East Stroudsburg.”

“We're going to coach hard on Sunday. The meetings will be hard on Sunday,” Franklin said. “To me, if we have the team that I think we do then they want that. They want us to coach them hard and make the corrections.

“I don't want to do it after a win, but there are things that we have to get fixed and get fixed quick. We have a really good football team coming in this week, and we need to find a way to get better in the areas that we’re weak in right now and that's on offense, defense, and special teams.”

Harvard, East Stroudsburg, or anywhere in between, Franklin is no dummy.

So while Saturday might not have been a “mental health day” meant to be excused or ignored by the Nittany Lion coaching staff and players, that Franklin seemed to go in the other direction, emphasizing the shortcomings while heightening the urgency of their corrections, was a bit of a psychological play in itself.

Fifth-year senior quarterback Sean Clifford, speaking to reporters after the game, reflected that when he said the team was dedicated to “making sure that you’re learning from the wins so that you don’t have to learn from a loss.”

To that effect, Penn State had something of an ideal scenario for itself Saturday.

While areas of the performance certainly could have been improved - another sub-100-yard rushing day, a turnover, a failed fourth-down try, another missed field goal all coming to mind - the reality is that anything short of a perfect stat line would have been used as fodder for improvement as the program resumes Big Ten play next weekend. But against a Villanova program loaded with experience and very competitive at its level, all of those elements existed without ever truly being at risk of a loss for the Nittany Lions.

“It’s one of those deals that you talk about until you’re blue in the face, you show examples. We have had to have setbacks in the past to really grow and learn and we shouldn’t have to do that, so we’ll emphasize that point as strongly as you possibly can,” Franklin said. “We’ll have pretty aggressive meetings (Sunday) going through these things.

“What I would never want to do is go in a locker room after a win, and it doesn’t feel like a win. I think you have to be very careful of that as a coach.”

Something of a tightrope act for Franklin, the tenor of everything coming out of the Nittany Lions performance Saturday suggested that no, he didn’t want it to feel as though his program hadn’t won.

But, he also wanted to make sure the feeling was as close as he could manage to that of a loss.

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Villanova head coach Mark Ferrante’s choice of words in his Wildcats’ post-mortem caught my eye in its resemblance to past Penn State offensive iterations.

“We got "big-played" to death,” Ferrante said. “I think it was probably six big plays, obviously the opening play of the game on their possession and then a few other long plays.”

For the record and a little bit of clarification, that big-play list included a 52-yard picture-perfect connection between Clifford and receiver Jahan Dotson on the very first play and offensive possession of the game for Penn State.

Though the Nittany Lions had other missed opportunities through the course of the game, the final line showed seven completions worth 332 of Clifford’s 401 total passing yards on the day. That’s an average of 47 yards per completion on Penn State’s chunk passing plays Saturday afternoon.

Three more times, the Nittany Lions went to the house on those plays including another 52-yarder from Clifford to Parker Washington, KeAndre Lambert-Smith’s 83-yard catch-and-run to the end zone to open the second-half scoring, and finally another 23-yard TD strike to Washington at the end of the third quarter.

Following the game, Franklin spoke about one-dimensionality on offense and how that needs to be avoided, the Nittany Lions failing to produce a run of longer than 13 yards on the day and limited to just two over 10 yards for the game.

But the gentle counter to Ferrante, Franklin, and the general underlying sentiment expressed after the game is two-fold:

The first element is that Penn State very much wants to exploit offensive big plays in every game possible. Those points count. Those yards count. The win counts.

The second is that this should feel pretty familiar to Penn State football, both in the performance itself as well as in the issues noted afterward.

“You can't be one-dimensional. You can't sustain it, being one-dimensional. You have to be able to run,” Franklin said. “There's going to be times where we're going to have to run the ball out on offense and a four-minute offense is going to magnify those issues. We have to find a way to improve in these areas because we can't be so one-dimensional.”

Fair enough, in situational respects, but Penn State can, will, and has before established plenty of winning by spanning half the field on a single passing play repeatedly in a game.

Only a “for what it’s worth” here, but Villanova’s leading tackler, linebacker Forrest Rhyne, offered this about another game in which the Wildcats kept an opponent in check on the ground.

"We think that we are the number one rushing defense in the country, in FCS I should say, but that is how we play,” Rhyne said. “It’s just confidence. We have had that confidence.

“This is the same starting six that we have had for two years and we have always been stout in the run. Our defense is built to stop the run and that is the number one thing that we emphasize."

And, on the other side, a moment of calm from Clifford regarding the performance of the Nittany Lions’ offensive line.

“We can’t throw for 400 yards and have a bad offensive line,” Clifford said. “We had a great day passing the ball, so no, I think our offensive line did a great job.”

In total, 14 of 15 Penn State offensive performers tasked with pass blocking Saturday finished with an above-average grade from PFF. The Nittany Lions’ run-blocking effort - on a team-wide basis - was not as proficient, with only Ola Fashanu, Bryce Effner, Juice Scruggs, and Brenton Strange finishing with an above-average grade.

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