Blue White Illustrated

6eld. It's why a 9-0 Minnesota team was ranked eighth in the Nov. 12 poll, one spot ahead of an 8-1 Penn State team that had played a tougher schedule. Strength of schedule seemed to play a key role in the committee's rationale for placing Georgia in the fourth position even though it had a loss to unranked South Carolina. Right now, the playo7 committee ranks the Southeastern Conference as the best in college football and the only league worthy of having two teams in the playo7 6eld. Maybe the Big Ten will merit that sort of consideration in the years to come, but for that to happen, someone will have to emerge as a legiti- mate challenger to Ohio State's reign. I believe Penn State could be that team, but it will have to improve in a number of di7erent areas on o7ense and defense to take the next step. Penn State's o7ense is most e7ective when it creates opportunities for explo- sive plays by the skill-position players. That's the way it's designed. It's not the kind of o7ense that's geared toward dominating the line of scrimmage, slow- ing down the tempo of the game and using the clock as an ally the way Min- nesota did. When Penn State won the Big Ten championship in 2016, it had a quarter- back in Trace McSorley who passed for 3,614 yards and led the conference with more than 4,000 yards of total o7ense. It had four pass-catchers with more than 50 receptions apiece: Chris God- win, DaeSean Hamilton, Mike Gesicki and Saquon Barkley. Gesicki was con- sidered by many college football analysts to be one of the top three tight ends in the country, and Barkley proved that he was a generational talent at running back. The reason why Penn State didn't get a lot of hype from the national college football media going into the 2019 sea- son was because its skill position players on o7ense weren't perceived as having the type of potential that Barkley, Mc- Sorley and their teammates displayed in previous years. No one expected Sean Cli7ord to play the way he did during September and October, and even though K.J. Hamler and Pat Freier- muth were considered by many to be legitimate 6rst-team All-Big Ten performers, there didn't seem to be enough proven talent around them to li8 Penn State into con- tention in the rugged Big Ten East Division. But with an improved defense that went into the game at Min- nesota ranked 6rst in the Big Ten and second in the country against the run, the Lions were very much in contention at 8-0 overall and 5-0 in the conference. Even with an abundance of youth on of- fense, Penn State had enough balance to stay undefeated through the 6rst two months of the season. It took the Go- phers' upset win to show that the Nit- HOT START Clifford has shown a lot of promise in his first season as a starter, but the Lions need to develop more depend- able targets in the passing game if their offense is to reach its potential. Photo by Steve Manuel

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