Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/703041
Illustrated website editor Nate Bauer to talk about Penn State's defense. Here's what he had to say… BWI Some have speculated that the high-tempo offense Penn State is in- stalling will create pressure on the de- fense. Do you agree? PRY I'm sure there's some merit to it, but our first focus is the unit itself. I do think we're pretty talented but I also think we're going to be green in some ar- eas. We're going to be young in some ar- eas. We'll have a little more youth on the field, particularly up front, than we've had. And that's probably the area where you love maturity – physical maturity, which is very important. But we do have some veterans in the back seven. I think the linebackers – [Jason] Cabinda, [Ny- eem] Wartman and [Brandon] Bell – are probably three of the more experienced and polished guys around the league and maybe beyond that. And we've got some veterans in the back end now. Grant Ha- ley has played a lot of football, John Reid in a short time has played a lot of ball. Marcus Allen brings a lot of experience to the field. Malik Golden has kind of emerged as a quiet leader in the second- ary. He's very savvy, very smart. He's emerged as a guy you really trust. So I think there's a transition on de- fense, not just from a coaching stand- point but with some of those old heads who had a strong voice: Jordan Lucas, Anthony Zettel, Carl Nassib. Those voids have to be filled. There's a changing of the guard with Bob and I. We kind of did this thing to- gether, and that's a lesser transition than maybe the leadership with the players. And we have a strong defensive staff: [Sean] Spencer and Terry [Smith] and now Tim [Banks]. There's a lot of matu- rity, a lot of experience as coaches, just good mentors to the guys, which I think has helped that process of moving from one coordinator to another. As far as Coach Moorhead and his of- fense, I'm very excited about it. It's no secret that we've struggled putting points on the board. It's exciting to me that we've got a chance to outscore some people. To me, there's pressure when you take the field and it's 14-7 and one play can be the difference. Conversely, there's pressure on that opposing offense when you're up by two scores or they feel like they need to score every time they take the field. There's pressure for them that way. So it's a tradeoff in my mind, it really is. I think you have to embrace the offensive style, whatever it is. There's been a change, and we need to embrace this philosophy, we need to factor it into our coaching. It does not detract in my mind at all from the ability to play great defense, the ability to win games defensively. We plan to do that. We've been awful good on defense for a five-year run, for me personally, going back a little bit further. I believe we've got a staff, a group of older players who understand what it takes to play good defense. I don't think there's going to be a change in that be- cause of the offense. BWI Does it help to know that holding an opponent to 34 points might be enough, as opposed to holding it to 17? PRY You don't plan by saying, "You know, they're probably going to score a few more than they did last year" or "They're going to have three more pos- sessions." You don't plan that way. You want to find stops, and some games you don't get as many as others and we've had some low-scoring games over the past several years, but we've had some wins where we didn't play quite as well. When you break it down and look into each game and each offense, we try and evaluate the things we need to do better. So when we went against the offense this spring, there were weaknesses that showed up, there were strengths. How can we correct these weaknesses? Is it a talent thing with a particular player? Is it personnel-related? Is it something with a technique that maybe we can teach differently or teach better? Is it something schematically that encom- passes more of what the actual defensive call is or what our plan was? So you break it down, and where we need to do a nice job is in making sure we prepare as well for an offense that is unlike ours. When I was at Georgia Southern, we defended the triple option every day in practice. Some thought that was a disadvantage. I didn't see that. I saw the advantages of defending an of- fense where you had to have strong tacklers on the perimeter and be very disciplined in your assignment. The strengths that came from that allowed us to be a top-ten defense playing what- ever style of offense. And that's kind of the way I see this. To me, it's advanta- geous what Coach Moorhead and the of- fensive guys are doing. We didn't get to see that a whole lot in practice and now we do. We're seeing it against league op- ponents and it's everywhere in college football. So to me, it helps us that way. BWI Is there too much of a focus on stats? PRY I think you can't disregard stats. Stats are highly important to a lot of coaches out there, and to a lot of admin- istrators and to a lot of fans. For me per- sonally, I don't need stats to evaluate their performance. When I come in, you have a pretty good feeling of the game on Saturday. You come in and watch that film Saturday night or Sunday morning, and I know where we weren't good enough. … You know that coming off the field. I've been in games [in which] we held teams to 179 yards and we lost. We didn't play well enough, and you can go back and look at that film and you can see where we needed to be better and where we should have been. There have been games where we gave up 30 and you look at the film and think, "Goddang, we played really good." Every game is its own deal, and there are so many things that affect the outcome. We want to be really good fundamentally. We want to have a lot of maturity out there. We want to handle adversity. We want to have a good, solid plan. Those are the things that lead to success on de- fense and allow you to defend any style of offense. I've been in situations where you've expected one thing and you've practiced 2 0 1 6 P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L