This can be another one of those columns that throws a million numbers at fans, explaining statistically why Joe Moorhead’s offenses over the years at Akron and Connecticut and most recently at Fordham have been more successful than John Donovan’s at Vanderbilt and Penn State.
But if Penn State and head coach James Franklin hired Moorhead on Saturday as its next offensive coordinator because of the statistics he piled up at an FCS school, or at Akron or UConn, then shame on them.
Of course, it’s safe to assume they didn’t.
“It’s not the Xs and the Os,” former Penn State defensive coordinator Tom Bradley used to say, “it’s the Jimmys and the Joes” that matter most to coaches.
Mediocre coaches can look great when their players are outstanding. Smart, talented, thoughtful coaches can look pedestrian when they don’t have the horses to run the race. Penn State fans shouldn’t pretend they have the requisite first-hand knowledge yet to say for sure whether Moorhead will be a transitional figure for the program or just another assistant who couldn’t overcome the obstacles that befell Donovan, his predecessor.
Good coordinators, though, are ones who can effectively teach a fun system that has been proven successful and easy to learn. That makes Moorhead potentially a very good, solid hire for Franklin.
Not sure if Franklin used this correlation as a measuring stick, but it does help anyone familiar with what Penn State has done on offense under Donovan that the Nittany Lions and Fordham both had Army as a common opponent this season.
In fairness to Donovan, Penn State played the Black Knights in a driving rainstorm at Beaver Stadium in October, while Moorhead’s Rams faced them on a beautiful upstate New York night in early September in the
season opener. But there was no comparison between how Fordham and Penn State attacked the Army defense.
Fordham scored 37 points. Penn State scored 20. Fordham passed for more yards (322) than Penn State gained (264). Fordham running back Chase Edmonds rushed for just 30 fewer yards (126) than Penn State quarterback Christian Hackenberg threw for (156) in the same amount of attempts (19).
Here’s the kicker: Fordham ran just seven more plays than Penn State did. So, it’s very easy to determine that against the one common opponent they had, Moorhead’s FCS offense thoroughly outperformed Penn State’s FBS offense.
Look, offense doesn’t have to be complicated to be successful, and to be blunt, Penn State’s offense appeared far more complicated to run last season than Fordham’s.
Watching his Rams play Army, it was amazing how few formations Moorhead’s offense implemented. The vast majority of the time, they’d line up three wideouts to the right side and one to the other or two on each side. The tight end occasionally lined up as a sidecar to the quarterback, who takes every meaningful snap out of the shotgun. But most of the time, the tight end lined up in the backfield, just off the hip of one of the tackles. In most every sense, this looked like a traditional 2000s-style spread offense.
It was what happened after the snap that made this offense different.
Almost every pass play, they’d flood the strong side. One receiver on a deep route. Another on an intermediate one. Another, either the back or tight end typically, could be found as safety valves.
This wasn’t an offense designed to exploit one player’s talents. It is an offense designed to attack the defensive scheme the opponent shows. It is focused far more on concepts everyone on the field accepts than plays they run. When the defenses changed the looks, the receivers changed their routes. A Cover 2 could turn a go-route into a post, so another receiver’s corner route would be open. Against some coverages, those deep routes were just for show, so the running back or the tight end or a backside receiver could make a play against a mismatch in space.
Watch Moorhead’s receivers, and they almost look like basketball players working around each other to get an open look. His scheme is designed to get the best play it can against the coverage it is given by flooding zones and running crossing routes and forcing defenses to understand it has to cover the entire field on every play. Once the defense accepts that, Moorhead will call a running play, create diversions with motion to keep linebackers and safeties in their spots, and get a stunning amount of one-on-one matchups for running backs against linebackers to make big plays. That sounds like good news for Saquon Barkley, a freshman running back who can make any tackler miss.
Will all of this make Penn State a top program again? Who knows? Hey, the Jimmys and the Joes in blue and white will decide that, and the ones who play in East Lansing and Ann Arbor and Columbus will have something to say about it, too.
But make no mistake, Franklin’s Nittany Lions will provide Joe Moorhead with better talent than he has ever had to make the Xs and the Os work.
This is a good system, and there’s no reason it can’t be a successful one in the Big Ten.
Collins covers Penn State for Times-Shamrock. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com and follow him on Twitter @psubst