There’s no doubt about the fact that the Penn State roster has taken on a new look compared to last season. Besides the usual attrition to graduation and the NFL Draft, the head coaching turnover led to a sizable exodus of players via the transfer portal, larger than usual at any rate. With Matt Campbell coming in, a slew of new faces arrived, including 24 players from Iowa State.
Alongside Matt Campbell is his offensive coordinator, Taylor Mouser. By all accounts, the offense is humming right along,
as many of the players are already used to Mouser’s scheme, so that side of the ball appears to be ahead of schedule.
On the other side, new defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn is installing his scheme for the first time with all of the players, both old and new. Not unexpectedly, the defensive side of the ball appears to be lagging behind the offense by a bit.
I’ve mentioned previously that I am going to reserve judgment for the defense until the season gets started. Even with an influx of new faces, and implementing a new scheme, these are still D-1 players, and I expect that the defense will be fine (if not a top 10 unit like we all may be used to, but I’ll happily be wrong on that front as well).
So with the premise in place that the offense is clicking, while the defense is somewhere farther behind, how would you feel about Penn State becoming a Big 12 team in the Big Ten? That is, a team that prefers to run and gun and beat you in a shootout, rather than the traditional, borderline plodding showdowns of the B1G?
For what it’s worth, I’ve always found high-scoring games to be exciting. Never knowing what electric play is going to happen next, where the scoring will come from but knowing it’s going to happen one way or another. No offense to anyone who may enjoy it, but 52-49 is more exciting to me than 6-4.
Note, those were both losses by Penn State I just referred to – the first, the Rose Bowl game against USC, widely hailed as one of the best Rose Bowls of all time . . . and the other the most demoralizing and frustrating loss I can think of at the hands of the Iowa Hawkeyes.
In both cases, the good guys lost, but in one of them the game was exciting and fun to watch, while the other was like a root canal without anesthetic.
Of course, the dream is to have a Big 12 offense paired up with a Big Ten defense, and beat everyone 52-10. But we’ve all seen the “traditional” Big Ten games our whole lives. I wouldn’t hate at least one season of shootouts.
But what do you think? Should Matt Campbell try to run it up all year (perhaps out of necessity)? Or should he immediately try to make his new-look Nittany Lions conform to the traditional Big Ten standard?
