Perhaps the biggest question facing Penn State football in 2024 is centered on what the Nittany Lions’ offense is actually going to look like. There isn’t a shortage of film from new Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki’s time at Kansas or Buffalo, so you can surmise an inkling of what it might look like, but it’s mostly just an educated guess.
Because — with all due respect to the players at both programs — Kotelnicki never had Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton. He never had Drew Allar and Julian Fleming. He never had Tyler Warren and KeAndre Lambert-Smith. And he certainly never had all of them at the same time. For a coach who has made a name for himself making the most out fo what he has, he certainly has a lot to work with now.
“Coach K just told us straight up, that he’s giving the best players the ball. So everybody gotta show up during the spring and camp,” Singleton said on Thursday. “I’m excited about that. Just the plays he has. It just shows we’re ready for it. I’m excited, man. I can just see the plays working, so it’s been really good.”
Penn State’s upcoming Blue-White scrimmage on April 13 should be an interesting debut for an offense that still has a lot of room to grow. In fact, don’t be surprised if you see the same thing multiple times. Then again, that’s part of the fun of Kotelnicki’s offense, the same thing done different ways. At the end of the day there’s only so many ways to play football, but the more you can get the defense to think the better off an offense will be.
That is, of course, assuming the offense doesn’t confuse itself in the process. And that comes down to reps, and doing your homework.
“I think the biggest thing has been we’re getting to the same plays that we’ve been doing all spring, but through different formations, shifts and motions, things of that nature,” Allar said earlier in the week. “So everybody’s learning the concepts and not just one part of the concept, but learning the full concept.”
“So you’re going to get to the point, hopefully towards the end of the spring cycle and moving into the fall camp, where all the receivers can be plug-and-play at all the positions. So not just the H, and not just the X. They can play H, X, and Z, and even Y if we need to based on personnel packages. But I think we’re doing a really good job on the offensive end right now. Coach K is always big with distortion and creating a lot of space for us on the offense. and getting us into open space, one-one-one opportunities for us [to] show off our abilities as ball carriers and pass-catchers too. So, I think he does a great job of, you know, presenting us opportunities of making plays in space and getting us into those opportunities through our practices.”
It will be interesting to see how a new-look offense for Penn State lights a spark for a program that has needed something to get the ball rolling in the right direction again offensively. If the Nittany Lions can catch the sort of lightning in the bottle that they had in 2016 and 2017 under then offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead, it could go a long way toward putting a right foot forward in the expanded playoff era.
And if you’re looking for a tie between Moorhead and Kotelnicki, both of whom share a clichéd but observable so-called mad-genius personality trait, you might not need to look further than Moorhead’s own first series of spring practices in State College. A lot of the same words come up there, too.
“So although everybody is focused on this being a new offense, and it is, it’s not like Joe’s coming in here and running plays that have never been run before in college football or the NFL,” Penn State coach James Franklin said at the time. “Everybody’s running the same plays. You’re running inside zone, you’re running outside zone, you’re running power, you’re running horizontal stretch, you’re running vertical stretches, you’re running high/lows, or whatever it may be.
“But what I think the important part, is how you package things, how you complement things and how you’re able to take things that may seem complex and make them seem easy to other people. And Joe’s got a really good way of installing things and making it look like you’re doing a lot of things when you’re really not. Tempo helps with that. Formations help with that … I think Joe’s got a really good feel of his system and how one thing complements the next.”
The hope for Penn State now is that the comparisons of Moorhead and Kotelnicki continue to stay the same. But first everyone has to see what this new offense actually looks like.
