The good news for Penn State fans is that your Sunday won’t be starting this week in the depressing malaise of defeat and will rather begin the sweet ecstasy of victory. Or at least as much as one can enjoy the sweet taste of 1-5, with that first win coming against a nearly as bad Michigan team.
Nevertheless, wins are wins, and in 2020 Penn State will take all of the ones it can get. If nothing else, Penn State is still about a third of the way toward winning the NFC East so really it’s all about perspective.
Here are the grades.
Offense: B
Look, Penn State’s offense is not born of the 2016 cloth nor is it trying to be. But in the greater context of this season it ran for 200+ yards, managed nearly 200 yards passing and didn’t turn the ball over once. It converted half of its third down attempts, scored 27 points on the road in a stadium it rarely scores in and it won the game. Penn State managed a key drive late when it needed one and balanced between Will Levis and Sean Clifford when it had to.
Keyvone Lee and Caziah Holmes both were productive on the ground and Clifford managed to engineer a productive performance without throwing an interception for the first time all season. Penn State averaged 5.3 yards per carry on the ground, adjusted for sacks.
Penn State’s offensive front also only allowed two tackles for a loss all game which seems like a perfectly fine number given the arbitrary nature of football mistakes. All told this group did enough to win against a team it could beat. Was it perfect? Not at all. Could it be better? 100%. But for a team that was looking for a win and really needed one, the Nittany Lions made the most out of what it had to work with.
Credit to Parker Washington for becoming a legitimate threat in the receiving game in spite of Penn State’s ongoing struggles. Nearly 100 yards on Saturday proved him more than capable, especially after the catch, yet again.
Defense: C
Penn State only gave up two passes of more than 15 yards and four rushes of 10+ yards which is really all that bad. This group hasn’t quite figured things out yet and benefited slightly from Michigan’s own self-inflicted wounds, but there are worse things than being in the right place to cover a bad pass.
Michigan had just 112 yards passing, none of which were overly remarkable and 174 yards on the ground came in chunks but were largely unthreatening in the grand scheme of things.
When it’s all said and done Michigan’s own incompetence helped to boost Penn State’s defensive prowess but beggars can’t be choosers with this bunch. The Wolverines only cranked out 55 plays all game, 29 fewer than the Nittany Lions, but possession isn’t everything these days.
All told, you’re going to win a lot of games when you only give up 17 points, and whether or not Michigan is just generally bad, you’ve still got to make tackles and be present the field. Penn State was, which is noteworthy during a season when not much as gone its way.
Special Teams: C-
Jourdan Stout having a random case of the kick-it-out-of-bounds was odd, coupled with his long missed field goal. All told though this group continues to be generally positive by the nature of being generally irrelevant. This grade would be lower if the kicks had mattered but Michigan couldn’t do much on offense and one missed field goal from 49-yards out is hardly some institutional failure.
Stout only averaged 37.5 yards a punt, which is low by any standard and low by his own.
This grade would be lower if it had impacted the game, but generally special teams were an afterthought. So it escapes with a passing grade by virtue of its irrelevance.
Coaching: A-
A higher grade than most would expect. Penn State gave Sean Clifford easy throws, the defense made stops and generally speaking the Nittany Lions played their best all-round game of the year. One might say that Penn State was playing a bad Michigan team, but considering that post-Ohio State the Nittany Lions haven’t exactly been going up against murders’ row, you can’t judge a team for playing well against a team it should -in theory- play well against.
Penn State’s issues in the red zone continue to be a thing, and the first down spike late in the second quarter was seemingly dumb, but we can maybe chalk that up to not having any idea what was, or wasn’t, going on at the moment between the staff and the offense. That’s maybe a cop-out, but at some point there is a polite assumption to be made that we don’t actually know everything, despite our best efforts to pretend that we do.
Counterpoint, it may have just been poor game management.
After weeks and weeks of looking decidedly not-good, Penn State looked good enough to beat a divisional rival in a stadium it rarely wins, during a season it had never won. All of these things happening six weeks into the season count for something. Even if that something is not the flashiest thing to cross the path of Penn State football.
Full marks for not packing it in.
Also, what is up with those end zone fades?
Overall: B
I mean, they won, they played pretty well and did enough to hang on in the fourth quarter. That checks off more than a few boxes with good teams, let alone teams that are 0-5. The grade is low because it could have been better, but who among us couldn’t.
