Where Can The Penn State Offense Improve This Offseason? | Positional Breakdown
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Penn State football is hard at work improving as a team during the winter conditioning period. It’s also a time when players can work on their own to improve their craft and make meaningful progress as individuals. That collective groundswell of improvement has the potential to change teams drastically between one year and the next. So, where can those players, and then, by extension, position groups improve? We’re discussing that today on the BWI Live Show.
We’re discussing where each offensive position can get better before next season, independent of the new scheme brought in by new Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki. Today we look at the offensive line, running backs and tight ends to find out where each group can help the ground game.
Penn State positional improvement starts up front
The biggest change for the Penn State offense will happen in the trenches. Three of the team’s starters moved on to the NFL this offseason, so picking an area that the starters from last year need to improve upon is problematic. However, there is a list of young players who do all share a similar wrinkle to their games. Here’s an excerpt from the article detailing this issue earlier this week.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of stats for plays that are almost made, especially for offensive linemen. But the theme last year for several of the team’s up-and-coming players was that they did a good job initially with a block but failed to secure that play long enough for the running backs to get through the hole uncontested.
We’ll discuss how that tendency affects tackle Drew Shelton and guards JB Nelson and Vega Ioane and what it could mean for next year
Penn State running backs, but really Nick Singleton
Both running backs Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen saw extra attention from the defense last year, and it affected how they performed in the box score for most of the season. So, what can they do individually to improve their game? We discuss how Singleton progressed as a runner, which made him take a step back as a playmaker. How can he blend the two next year? We’ll dig into areas in which he can reincorporate his unique skills.
Tight Ends can improve as run blockers
To kick off the series, we started with the tight ends and their run-blocking inconsistency from last year. The team lost explosiveness because they didn’t provide clear lanes to bounce the ball outside. Here’s how it broke down.
Truthfully, pin and pull is just one obvious example of outside running. The real issue for Penn State is that they couldn’t efficiently bounce the ball outside on their standard zone concepts. According to PFF, Penn State ran for 260 fewer yards on plays hitting the left and right edge of the tackle box, outside the C gap. Despite that large yardage total, it’s not a huge number of runs per game they missed. It works out to 2.4 runs per game, where Penn State’s runners stay inside the tackle box to get yards.
We’ll discuss who can help this situation and how it can be resolved.
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