UCLA Football Preview: Penn State's Franklin Keeps on Winning
Penn State has been successful under Franklin even while his coordinators keep changing.
The last time I wrote about Penn State football was probably on the old site around the time that Jim Mora hired former Penn State defensive coordinator and interim head coach Tom Bradley to be UCLA’s defensive coordinator back in 2015.
There was a spirited discussion at the time about whether Bradley should have been hired by UCLA or not because of the Jerry Sandusky case. Without delving back into that conversation, we haven’t really had a reason to discuss the Nittany Lions since then because the Bruins haven’t played Penn State until joining the Big Ten this season. With UCLA visiting Happy Valley this weekend, let’s take a look at the current state of Penn State football.
After Bradley’s four-game stint as interim head coach following the firing of Joe Paterno, the Nittany Lions hired the Patriots’ then-offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien as the team’s new head coach. But O’Brien left after just two seasons to become the head coach of the Houston Texans.
As an aside, O’Brien had agreed to become the offensive coordinator at Ohio State earlier this year, but was hired as the new head coach at Boston College in February. His departure from Ohio State opened up the job that Chip Kelly took.
When O’Brien left Happy Valley, Penn State hired James Franklin, who had turned around the football program at Vanderbilt. Since taking over the Nittany Lions in 2014, Franklin has had a winning record every season with the exception of 2020 when they played a shortened schedule due to COVID. In each of those nine winning seasons, Penn State has made it to a bowl game and, in five of those nine seasons, the Nittany Lions have played in one of the New Year’s Six bowl games.
Overall, that’s impressive, even though Penn State won only five of those nine bowl games.
UCLA hasn’t come close to a New Year’s Six bowl game this century. In fact, the Bruins have never played in a bowl game in nine out of ten seasons. The closest they have come is eight out of ten seasons. The first time was from 1981 through 1988 when the team played in eight straight bowl games under Terry Donahue. An argument could be made that UCLA’s best bowl run might be from 2002 to 2015 when the Bruins made a bowl game in 12 out of 14 seasons under three different head coaches. At the same time, none of those games were upper tier bowl games either, making Franklin’s success at Penn State stand out.
What’s more impressive is that Franklin has achieved this success while continuously replacing his top assistants, many (but not all) of whom have been selected by other schools to take over their program.
This year, the Nittany Lions are 4-0 even though they have a new offensive coordinator as well as a new defensive coordinator.
Penn State’s new offensive coordinator is Andy Kotelnicki, who came to Happy Valley after spending the past three seasons as the offensive coordinator under Lance Leipold at Kansas.
He replaced Mike Yurcich who was fired ten games after the Lions lost to Michigan, even though they were 8-2. Besides the Wolverines, Penn State’s other loss came against perennial power Ohio State. It must be nice to have such high standards that you’re replacing coordinators after losing only two games, both of which were to a couple of the top teams in the nation.
In his third season with Kansas, Kotelnicki’s offense ranked seventh in the nation in yards per completion (14.76), eighth in rushing offense (211.3), 13th in third down conversion percentage (48.1) and 17th in passing efficiency (158.6). He’s continued that success so far at Penn State where the Nittany Lions are in the Top 15 in each of those categories this season.
By comparison, this year, UCLA’s Ethan Garbers is 67th in the nation in yards per completion. UCLA’s rushing offense is 132nd out of 133 teams in rushing offense with just 57 yards per game. The Bruins are also ranked 123rd in third down conversion percentage and 119th in passing efficiency. That’s how bad the Bruin offense has been under Eric Bienemy.
It looks like Kotelnicki runs a spread offense which features a running back, a tight end and three receivers but will sometimes swap out one of the receivers for a second tight end. I’ll discuss that more when we look at the offense.
On the other side of the ball, Penn State’s new defensive coordinator is former Indiana head coach Tom Allen. Allen was fired by the Hoosiers after last year. Allen replaced former Miami head coach Manny Diaz, who was hired to be the new head coach at Duke after Mike Elko left for Texas A&M. Despite the change in coordinators, the Nittany Lions are ranked no lower than 31 in several major defensive categories.
Let’s look at the Nittany Lions Special Teams.
Special Teams
Redshirt junior Sander Sahaydak will handle the field goals and PATs for Penn State. While he’s been perfect on PATs, he’s been awful on field goal attempts. Through four games, he’s missed three tries and made only two. That’s bad even for a college kicker.
To be sure, all three misses came from at least 40 yards, but when your kicker starts missing those, coaches tend to start trying other things. That may be another kicker or going for it more on fourth down. So, don’t be surprised to see either of the team’s kickoff specialists trying for field goals on Saturday.
There are two kickers who have kicked off this season for the Nittany Lions. Redshirt freshman Ryan Barker made his collegiate debut when he kicked off once against Kent State. In his only kickoff of the season, he booted it 61 yards.
Redshirt junior Gabe Nwosu, who’s listed on the roster as a punter, has been the primary kickoff specialist for Penn State, having kicked off 25 times this season. He’s averaging 63.8 yards per kickoff with 15 touchbacks and two which have gone out of bounds. As long as Nwosu is kicking off, don’t expect the Bruins to be returning many kickoffs.
Junior Riley Thompson is another of those Australian punters. With Nwosu handling kickoffs, Thompson has been the team’s only punter this season. He is averaging 43.9 yards per punt with a long of 56 yards which came against Bowling Green.
Redshirt sophomore wide receiver Kaden Saunders has taken four of the five punt returns for Penn State this season. On his four returns, he’s only gained 25 yards for an average of 6.3 yards per punt return. The other punt return was taken by redshirt senior Jake Spencer, who only gained two yards on that one.
Junior running back Nicholas Singleton has been Penn State’s primary kickoff returner. He’s returned four of five kickoffs for the Nittany Lions and he’s averaging 19 yards per return. His longest of the year was a 40-yarder which qualifies him as a “dangerous return guy,” even though he’s only averaging 12 yards per return on his other three returns.
But Singleton is still a better option than Andrew Rappleyea. The redshirt freshman tight end has returned one kickoff for five yards. I’m assuming it was probably some sort of squib kick where he was tackled quickly. Needless to say, I don’t expect to see him returning any kickoffs on Saturday, but that’s also because I don’t expect to see UCLA kicking off much in the game either.
Go Bruins!
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I haven't seen the Bruins a whopping 28 point dogs in many years. Ouch.
I think Penn State covers 4 TDs. We'll see.