Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/861263
P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L ou can't blame people for getting the wrong idea about Penn State's style of offense. The Nittany Lions were so eager to push the ball down the field last year, so determined to gobble up yardage in chunks, so brazen about their desire to turn every moment into a YouTube sen- sation – a feat they actually accom- plished in the Rose Bowl, in which they scored touchdowns on four consecutive offensive plays – that it was easy to characterize their approach as a glorified version of sandlot football. In this telling, Penn State's offense had ad- vanced past the basketball-on-grass cliché to something even more recklessly aggressive, something more like pinball on grass, a game combining genuine skill and pure dumb luck, with the line sepa- rating the two often hard to discern. It was a fun idea, conjuring up mental images of Trace McSorley diagramming plays in the dirt. But like a lot of fun ideas, it was total nonsense. Joe Moor- head was certainly having none of it at Penn State's football media day earlier this month. Responding to a seemingly innocuous question about the next step in McSorley's evolution, Penn State's second-year offensive coordinator used the opportunity to push back hard on the notion that the Nittany Lions were simply playing pitch-and-catch. "This thought process that's prevailing that you hear about – and frankly, this is a gross mischaracterization of the appli- cation of our offense and the role of the quarterback – that Trace just drops back and picks the deepest receiver and chucks the ball up and hopes the guy makes the play, that's, in a lot of ways, ridiculous at best and, quite frankly, asinine at worst," Moorhead said. "I don't have all the answers, but I do know this: A kid couldn't lead the league in multiple passing categories and set school single-season records and be on the verge of multiple other school records if he was just throwing the ball indiscriminately down the field. In a lot of ways, I feel that minimizes the role of the people who game plan the plays, the person who calls them, and the player who executes them." It bears mentioning that we are less than two years removed from a very dif- ferent conversation, one in which the Nittany Lions were unlikely to be ac- cused of playing basketball on grass or, for that matter, any other game in which the numbers on the scoreboard fre- quently changed. It sometimes seemed as if they were playing football on wet concrete. If some people are talking about their recent offensive output as if it were nothing more than a run of good luck, well, it beats the alterna- tive; just ask Moorhead's predecessor, John Dono- van. Still, point taken. It's surely irritating to have your success written off as a fluke, and Moor- OFF TO THE RACES Y Their high-octane offense is primed for another big season as the Nittany Lions look to prove that this program has staying power READY, SET, GO A group of receivers take part in a drill during the first day of preseason prac- tice. The Nittany Lions return 11 of the 13 players who caught at least one pass last year. Photo by Patrick Mansell