Blue White Illustrated

him in the backfield on the Buckeyes' final offensive play. The Lions' next two games proved that their showing against Ohio State was no fluke. Penn State held Purdue to 46 yards rushing, then held Iowa to 30 while sack- ing quarterback C.J. Beathard four times. To Franklin, there's no big secret behind the defensive line's upturn. "It's not real profound," he said. "They are gaining ex- perience. They were inexperienced guys at the beginning of the year. We have guys like Cothren who has played a decent amount of football, and Brown and Sick- els have played a decent amount of foot- ball for us. The other guys lacked experience. Robert Windsor is a redshirt freshman, and he's had a big role for us this year. Guys like that are coming on for us. You look at Shareef, there's another guy. Those guys were redshirts last year. I think that the biggest difference from the beginning of the year till now is the expe- rience that they've gained by playing week-in and week-out." That experience has helped Penn State reverse an alarming trend. For most of its history, there have been two sure ways to lose lots of football games in the Big Ten Conference. The first has been to run the ball ineffectively. The second has been to defend the run ineffectively. Do one of those things, and you're going to have problems; do both, and it's going to be a long season. For a while, it looked as though Penn State was going to do both this year. After their 49-10 drubbing at Michigan on Sept. 24, the Nittany Lions were averag- ing a meager 101.3 rushing yards per game and were surrendering 213.8 rushing yards, ranking last among Big Ten teams in both categories. Both were major con- cerns, but at least on offense, the Lions returned a proven playmaker in Saquon Barkley. Even in the midst of a mediocre 2-2 start, the conventional wisdom held that it would be only a matter of time be- fore Barkley began gouging opponents on the ground the way he did as a freshman. But the defense? That was a different story. The line had been hollowed out by the exit of starters Austin Johnson, An- thony Zettel and Carl Nassib following the 2015 season, and there was no telling how long it would take to reassemble an effective starting four, much less build the kind of depth that Penn State would need in order to keep Minnesota, Ohio State, Michigan State and others from doing just what Pitt and Michigan had done. But even though the initial results were concerning, Penn State's coaching staff kept the faith. Spencer refused to call the team's personnel overhaul a rebuilding project because he didn't like the conno- tation. "We want those guys to reload," he said. "What I mean by that is that you set a bar for yourself. There was a bar set prior to you getting here, and you either have to match that or go above it. That's the philosophy of reloading." Those expectations went unrealized in week two, as Penn State's defensive front was overrun in a 42-39 loss at Pitt. And yet, buried in the grisly stats from that game was an indication that the Lions' problems were not going to be insur- mountable. Yes, the Panthers finished with 341 rushing yards, but it wasn't as though they had manhandled Penn State from start to finish. In the second half, the Lions held Pitt to 115 yards on the ground. To Franklin, those numbers suggested that his team hadn't been physically overpowered. If that had been the case, the second half would have been at least as bad as the first, because the linemen would have worn down as the game went on. The more they studied the game, the more convinced the coaches were that their inexperienced linemen had simply allowed themselves to get caught out of position by an offense that was adept at using fly sweeps to complement its be- tween-the-tackles running game. "Really, it was as simple as us being gap-sound," Franklin said. "If you're a defensive tackle and you have the A gap, or you have the C gap, you cannot allow the offensive lineman to lull you away from your gap, because now you put the linebacker in conflict. He knows he's re- sponsible, and he sees the B gap is wide open, and now he's in conflict. What do I do? How do I take on that block? Do I rip up through the A gap and defeat that gap, or try to play the blocker down the middle and try to two-gap, which is not what you want linebackers to do? "We did a much better job of that in the second half. I think some of the fly sweeps and motions and shifts that they were doing made some of our young players a little more hesitant, and they weren't playing as fast, as aggressive, as they needed to play." The Nittany Lions didn't fare very well against Michigan, allowing 326 rushing yards to the Wolverines. But in their next game – at home against Minnesota – they

• Cover