Nittany Lion offensive lineman Eric Wilson is a smart guy. After all he went to Harvard before transferring to Penn State this past offseason, so he knows his stuff.
And if there was ever a lineman who could look like someone who once went to Harvard it’s Wilson. He’s tall, strong but unassuming and babyfaced in a way that would not lead you to believe he gets into physical hand-to-hand combat with defensive players every Saturday.
Make no mistake though, offensive line work is physical work; it’s violent work; it is a war inside of war that makes fingers crooked and wrists ache and bodies hurt more than most.
The issue though is that Penn State’s offensive line has been simply just fine. The Nittany Lions have given up just eight sacks this year through four games with a handful of those coming from quarterback Sean Clifford’s occasional tendency to hold onto the ball a few seconds too long. Against Auburn Clifford had all night to throw, and the Nittany Lion offensive front looked stout in protection.
But on the ground Penn State ranks 111th out of the 130 teams in FBS in rushing offense at 113.5 yards per game, second-lowest in the Big Ten, and their 3.41-yard per carry average is third-worst. Some of this is a product of a pass-first Mike Yurcich offense (Penn State averages just 33 carries a game with ranks 99th in the nation).
So what’s the difference? Is there a difference between the two types of blocking – run and pass – or is it all sorta the same thing?
“I think in each situation you’re expecting some variation of the blitz and twists and you know from your film that you can be confident what you think they’re going to be bringing,” Wilson said. “I like to think there’s not a difference mentally and physically. I think you want to be as physical as possible in each run and pass game and you want to be as mentally locked in as possible, to pick up any twist and blitz in either the run or pass.”
It’s hard to really pin down to the laymen what has gone wrong at time with Penn State’s running game, perhaps because it’s a little bit of everything. Sometimes it’s a lineman getting blown up, sometimes it’s a missed assignment or a missed block by a tight end. A lot of things can go wrong when you’re throwing a few tons of weight at fairly high speeds at each other.
But according to coach James Franklin, the one thing you can control is your physicality, and he would like to see more of an edge there.
“I’m looking for an amount of aggressiveness that is right up to the edge of what is legal and appropriate from the snap of the ball until the whistle is blown,” Franklin said earlier this week. “Nothing that’s going to be viewed or looked at as dirty, nothing that’s going to create penalties after the snap. When people watch us play, they see a team that played with tremendous effort and aggressiveness from the time the ball is snapped to the whistle.”
And ideally, once you get that, you can get the rest of what you want. Penn State has picked up just 11 carries that have gone from 10-to-20 yards in length a mark that is 118th in the nation. While the Nittany Lions may not be a rush-first team, at some point you’re going to need to be able to run the ball, and need to keep defenses’ honest with those runs.
“We’d love to get a little bit more explosive plays,” Franklin said. “We’d like to be a little bit more physical on short yardage. We’d like to break a few more tackles. I think it’s a combination of all of it: It’s the tight ends, it’s the O-line, it’s the running backs, it’s the coaches. It’s all of us. But I would say solid so far.”
