Penn State Nittany Lions College Football Pregame Quote, 01/07/2025

On offense:

Well, I would tell you, it’s a credit. I mean, all eleven players on offense, knowing what the heck is going on. It starts up front with your offensive line. It always will be, and always has been, about goal line and D-line, and how well those two teams, those positions, play and execute. Obviously, the running backs that we have are pretty elite. Obviously, the talented tight ends that we have are pretty elite. And the receivers that we have are probably not getting enough credit for how they’ve helped open up the running game, right? Because when people are over committing to that, we have been able to be explosive independently, with those throughout the course of the season at different times. But fundamentally, it’s about a total commitment from those guys to buy into the importance of doing that right. You get to this level, you get to this point in the season, you’re gonna have to run the football well, right, and you have to be able to throw the football well. And at some point, someone’s going to do something to maybe take away one facet of that game. You have to rely on the other one to be able to move the football. And I know that if you can’t stop the run, it’s a really long day for that opponent that over my 19 years of being a play caller, I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to call games, and you can run the ball well and really, well. Well, they do a really good job of defending the pass. They’re really aggressive up front. They don’t give you very big innings. They make you earn everything that you have in the throw game. And they do a really good job of defending the run. I mean, here we are in whatever semifinal game you would expect that, right? You would expect a sound defense with good players. And, you know, impressive scheme, complimentary scheme for guys.

Question: Your creativity is part of what you do as a play caller. How do you strike the balance of throwing those wrinkles in but not doing it too often?

“We kind of get stuck in a jack-of-all-trades and a master-of-none. It starts with identifying way back when you first get going with a team about what you want to be good at and why, and making sure that everything you do is rooted in substance. And then, the creativity piece, you got to be careful that if you end up doing too much, you maybe lose sight of some of the quote, unquote simple things that maybe aren’t as you know, whatever sexy looking. And so it’s about having to balance those two things. I can tell you, through the years to play caller, I have made the mistake of either living in both of those worlds too much, being too vanilla, if you will, and recognizing that I’m not helping our players execute, do their job, or being too creative and recognizing that you’re not fundamentally sound enough. So it truly that, and that is, I wish there was a little more science to that, than talking about it’s just a little bit of an art form and a little bit of feel and so that knowing your players and really spending time evaluating what practice looks like, how much do you have to spend time doing this or that, right, like if you guys spend a lot of time, you need to be able to get a lot of return on practice.