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It’s Not Penn State Football if You’re Running the Ball for 68 Yards in a White Out Game
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Penn State is now 0-3 in Big 10 play after losing 31-23 at home to Southern Cal on Saturday night.
They did not play a horrible game, and led in the third quarter before the defense allowed 10-play touchdown drives of 71 and 75 yards. PSU had an opportunity to get off the field on 4th and 1 and 3rd and 4 and couldn’t get it done on either sequence. There were some gross things that took place in this game, like three-man rushes and some questionable timeout usage, but the Lions weren’t exactly run off the field and just sort of failed to keep up after trading scores with the Trojans over three quarters.
One of the jarring things, though, is that they couldn’t run the ball on these guys.
PSU rushed 31 times for 68 yards, amounting to a 2.2 YPC average. Rocco Becht had 20 of those yards on 10 carries, so if you split it out and look at just the running backs, it was 21 carries for 48 yards and a touchdown between Carson Hansen and James Peoples.
It doesn’t feel like Penn State football, which is usually predicated on running the ball and getting in the quarterback’s face. Owning the line of scrimmage on both sides. Maybe it doesn’t look like that because Matt Campbell brought more than 20 guys from Iowa State with him, thus answering the question of whether or not the Cyclones would do anything in the Big 10. The answer seems to be no, though the transfers are largely skill players and defensive players and not on the offensive line.
To break it out a little bit for you, I asked the AI attached to our database to go back through the Saquon Barkley and Kaytron Allen/Nick Singleton eras and pull the B1G rushing stats:
2.64 yards per carry this season on 89 attempts. And these weren’t against Ohio State, Michigan, and Indiana. They couldn’t run the ball on Wisconsin, Northwestern, or Southern Cal, and two of those three games were at home. USC actually came into this game allowing 4.31 yards per carry and 140 rushing yards per game. Even Rutgers put up 168 against these guys in Piscataway, to the tune of 5.3 YPC.
If you go through the four-year average between 2022 and 2025, when Penn State arguably reached its peak under James Franklin, the Lions averaged 4.54 yards per carry and 172 ground yards per game while scoring 1.94 rushing touchdowns. That’s in Big 10 play. Every Penn State game felt like it was defined by the offensive line and the run game setting the tone. Miles Sanders and Trace McSorley ran for more than 2,000 yards in 2018. They had some productive moments from Journey Brown and Noah Cain and Sean Clifford. Akeel Lynch and Zach Zwinak were good, productive runners within a 15-year past window.
Maybe Cam Wallace and Quinton Martin deserve a bigger role. Maybe the offensive line just isn’t that good. The film is full of stuff looking like this:
Either way, it doesn’t look like Penn State football.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com