Previously: Penn State Defense

not full-blown Ghost Gardner, but definitely erratic [Fuller]

Penn State's offense looked somewhat more functional against Northwestern than they did against, say, Temple, when Christian Hackenberg looked destined to finish the season in a full-body cast. Thanks in large part to the emergence of slippery freshman running back Saquon Barkley, the PSU offense is now at least semi-functional.

It's hard to say it's much better than that, though. Here's how they did against Northwestern:

• Seven three-and-outs
• One four-and-out
• Two five-and-outs
• 8-play, 30-yard drive; interception
• 8-play, 39-yard drive; punt
• 9-play, 79-yard TD drive
• 5-play, 70-yard TD drive that should've been a three-and-out; 30 yards came from a roughing the punter and a late hit on Hackenberg after a scramble
• 5-play, 71-yard TD drive

That's two real scoring drives, another on which half the credit goes to Northwestern doing dumb things, and a lot of ugly.

Personnel. Seth's diagram [click to embiggen]:

The good news for PSU is they brought back a lot of players. You know the bad news if you watched them play last year.

Spread, Pro-Style, or Hybrid? Pro-style to a fault. Penn State's offense was most successful when they spread Northwestern out and ran the ball; they'd do this once in a while and then go right back to doomed under-center runs with an extra OL lining up at H-back. James Franklin is a great recruiter, but there's plenty of reason—and mounting evidence—to believe he's not much of a tactician.

Basketball on Grass or MANBALL? Penn State mostly ran inside zone, split zone, and the occasional power. Brian asked me to check if they ran any zone stretches since Michigan struggled so badly with them against Indiana; they ran none.

Hurry it up or grind it out? In very welcome news after last weekend, Penn State is dead last in the country in adjusted pace. They're brutally slow. This should prevent them from exploiting Ryan Glasgow's absence nearly as much as Indiana did; the Hoosiers not only wore out the starting DTs, they also prevented Michigan from subbing when the backups were caught on the field for extended time. PSU's offense isn't built to do that.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the breakdown.]

Quarterback Dilithium Level (Scale: 1 [Navarre] to 10 [Denard]): Hackenberg has decent feet when he's not taking far too long to get the ball out; he can avoid sacks by stepping up (when the pocket hasn't totally collapsed, at least) and he even had a nice seven-yard scramble that drew the late hit flag. He's still not much of a running threat. He gets a 4.

Dangerman: The aforementioned Barkley is averaging 6.6 YPC this season, and while he mostly struggled to find room against Northwestern, he consistently turned terrible situations into less-terrible ones by making free hitters miss, and late in the game he popped a few big plays.

Barkley combines strength and balance with an excellent jump-cut, which makes it tough to corral him in the backfield unless multiple linemen break free (which happens a decent amount). He's really tough to bring down in open space. All it takes from him is a subtle cut, like the one he puts on Anthony Walker for a touchdown out of the wildcat, and he's off, because you have to hit him square to take him down: 

Barkley had two touchdowns, both out of the wildcat, and the second was even more impressive (I'd already cut too many videos by that point). He's was also PSU's primary target for screens in this game, and he's effective when he gets any blocking help—which, again, isn't always the case. Michigan's key against him will be to prevent any jump-count bounces to the outside; Northwestern coped pretty well when they kept him between the tackles outside of a late 3rd-and-long draw when they had only six in the box and gave up a 26-yard gain, which was much more of an RPS issue than anything else.

Chris Godwin is Hackenberg's top target by some distance. He doesn't necessarily wow you in any one area, but he combines decent size with good hands and precise route-running to consistently produce yardage, especially in the intermediate region.

Zook Factor: I mean, you remember the timeout before intentional safety, right? James Franklin is terrible at game theory stuff, which came into play more on the defensive side in this game when he inexplicably failed to use his available timeouts when it was clear Northwestern was content to run the clock down for a game-winning field goal. Franklin realized this too late; PSU waited until there were 22 seconds left to use a timeout at all, Northwestern booted the field goal with nine seconds left, and PSU had all of one play to try to try for a miracle.

HenneChart: Hackenberg can still make those throws that make NFL scouts drool, but far too often he makes terrible decisions, and only a part of that can be blamed on the offensive line. I'll give him this—he knows how to stuff a HenneChart:

Sometimes he'll zip a throw into a tight window:

Sometimes he'll stare down a receiver for ages and throw it at him anyway:

He'll also sail a few throws and turf the occasional screen. The bad outweighed the good in this one, but Hackenberg is difficult to predict. He does seem to try for the big play too often, even when the situation dictates he should take the safe throw. Dae'Sean Hamilton is wide open on an in route for a first down pickup here on third-and-seven:

You can see Hackenberg isn't throwing to him, though. This is where he's throwing:

WR Saeed Blacknail ended up having to play defense there. Penn State punted.

OVERVIEW

Penn State mostly lined up under center on their early downs, and they often make their intentions pretty clear. Several of those ace and heavy formation runs (I threw wildcat in with heavy, YMMV) featured backup lineman Derek Dowrey as a jumbo H-back:

They ran some variation of the above several times. They shelved the below after one stuffed iso:

Gun usually meant pass.

As you can see, PSU kept it pretty balanced on first down, but they were almost always behind schedule, which led to the significant run/pass split on third downs—since two of those runs were of the give-up-and-punt variety, they had one third down on which they could reasonably expect to pound the rock and pick it up.

Further discussion has to start with the much-maligned offensive line. While they did give Hackenberg a clean pocket much more often than they were managing that early in the season, he still came under fire quite a bit, and Northwestern was content to sit back and rush four the whole game. Left tackle Paris Palmer was a turnstile, personally responsible for enough pressures that I lost count. Palmer and right guard Brian Gaia both get beat for what should've been a drive-ending sack here:

The end running right around Palmer was a common sight, as was Gaia messing up his assignment. I realize TE Mike Gesicki (#88) got rocked back here, but this is still a bad reaction to running into traffic while pulling:

You might be lulled into feeling sorry for Barkley at times. He has to work very hard to produce yardage while waiting for those occasional runs on which PSU either blocks well or throws rock to the defenses scissors. Between blown pickups, getting knocked into the backfield, and false starts, I had negative notes down for every one of PSU's starting linemen. Palmer and Gaia stood out as especially bad; nobody stood out as particularly good.

Tight end Brent Wilkerson was one of their more consistent blockers, which is one of the reasons he's starting over the much-hyped Gesicki. The other reason: Gesicki had two bad drops in this one, and that's not a new issue—he's caught 12 of his 29 targets this year. H-back Kyle Carter wasn't a factor in this game, but he sees the field on passing downs. Neither he nor Gesicki are good blockers. Wilkerson is a pure blocking TE; he's been targeted twice all season. Production from the TEs is nowhere near preseason expectations, even accounting for the absence of Adam Breneman, the former five-star whose injury issues have kept him out of all but one game the last two years.

Godwin stood out among the receivers as the guy who could get separation downfield; Hamilton and Geno Lewis were hardly targeted, and with Hackenberg looking downfield and failing to find an open receiver on multiple occasions it seemed like they were having trouble getting open. They did combine for one of the unlikeliest touchdowns I've seen all year:

That was so close to disaster, and then Lewis somehow uncorks one of the best passes I've seen all year. The play was a fitting capper to the drive kept alive by two Northwestern personal fouls.

Barkley has assumed the workhorse role; backup Akeel Lynch didn't get a single carry, seeing sparing snaps on passing downs.

Michigan has a good shot at shutting this offense down. I don't think PSU's line can handle Michigan's pass rush, even with Glasgow absent, and they're not going to tempo the backups to death like Indiana did unless they completely change their offensive identity—unlikely, even with a week off to prepare. I found the playcalling to be unimaginative and predictable outside of this well-designed fake screen:

Michigan can key on stopping Barkley, which is all about staying in your lane; he can break contain with one hard jump-cut, so Royce Jenkins-Stone needs to hold the edge and the linebackers/safeties must be disciplined when coming down to tackle. Unless Hackenberg rids himself of a lot of bad habits this week, forcing Barkley to work for his yardage should be enough to get Michigan the win; this offense is too inconsistent to put up many points on the Wolverines unless something out of the ordinary happens.