OK, I'm finally coming down off my drunken high from last night. lol. What a performance by our defense!
If I may, lets talk PSU. I have the not so distinct pleasure of living in State College and I work for the university. I guess I have quite a bit of insight on Penn State.
Offense:
The main guy they have to account for is their stud, first rounder of a tight end, Tyler Warren. He's big, tough and catches everything they throw at him. They use him in multiple roles and packages, and have quite a bit of success getting him in good matchups. He's a problem for our defense and we'll need to find ways to take him away. But he's going to get his catches and yards.
Keytron Allen, their RB, is solid. I would venture to say he's very similar to Love. Tough inside runner with speed on the edges.
Drew Allar, the QB. He very much impresses me. He's been around a while, has plenty of experience and spreads the ball around. This season he's done a good job of protecting the football and making good decisions. He is not a great runner and has had issues with pressure.
Their WR corp is pretty pedestrian. They do enough, but no one really stands out. If we can take away Tyler Warren, those guys will need to step up for them.
Defense:
They're solid across the board, but their front 4 is very good. They, like us, like to mix up pressure schemes. Abdul Carter... he's a stud DE. He'll be an issue to keep out of our backfield. They're secondary is an issue and has been all season. We need to find a passing game real quick to take advantage of this.
Coaching:
Well, lets just say that the natives in Happy Valley are restless and have been for quite some time with Franklin. He has struggled to win the big games (where does that sound familiar?). This staff I don't find as inept, they have fielded competitive teams for a while, but Ohio State and Michigan has had their number.
Overall:
PSU is a lot like Georgia I feel with the exception of having a QB that can throw the football well. They rely on their defense quite a bit and they've been good all year with exception of the Big Ten title game where they gave up a lot of points to Oregon. There is no quit in them, they play to the bell as we saw in that game, even though they came up short.
If Golden can figure out ways to shut down their TE and force them to other recievers, this will be another defensive slugfest as I don't think PSU's recievers are good enough to do a lot of damage against our secondary. I see no reason why we won't shut down their running game.
Offensively... well, we're going to have to play better than we did against Georgia and be able to throw the ball. They have a good pass rush, so I'd expect a lot of short passes and screens to try to slow them down and keep Leonard upright.
At this point, this is going to be very tough game since we'll be playing a team that is not handicapped by QB play like UGA was.
My initial thoughts... ND 31 PSU 28
Oh and one other note. I'm absolutely ecstatic to be playing Penn State for more reasons than one. Probably my greatest ND memory of all time was the Snow Bowl in 92. I was a kid and it was my first trip ever to South Bend for the game. Our seats were in the endzone right where it all went down in the blinding snow. Mirer to Brooks! I remember it was snowing so hard that PSU, in all white, you could not see them when they were at mid field.
Go Irish
