Built for Speed: How Penn State football’s new offense came to be

In a place that built up a decades-long reliance on the constant, something new is happening.

Penn State football, the sweetheart of the smashmouth; the guru of ground-and-pound and “three yards and a cloud of dust” will run a no-huddle uptempo spread for the first time in its long history.

The team also returns head coach James Franklin for a third year; he has brought in a new offensive coordinator, Joe Moorhead, who will run the spread in four speeds — the final of which he said will be “as fast as we possibly can go.”

“This is going to be an explosive offense. It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to score points,” quarterback Trace McSorley said in the spring. “That’s what most excites me, is letting that come to fruition. … When I first met with Moorhead, one of the first things he said was ‘Yeah, this is Linebacker U. It’s always been hard-nosed power football. … Let’s make Penn State like an Oregon. Let’s be known for Penn State playing fast, tons of yards, explosive plays.’”

Moorhead had spent the last decade or so moving up and around the ranks in college football and piecing together his scheme bit by bit. While a head coach at previous stop Fordham, his teams put up mind-bogglingly productive numbers and, year-to-year, flipped its fate from the FCS dredges to a small-school powerhouse.

The idea, then, was to take the talented athletes on Penn State’s roster, brought in throughout the two years-and-change prior by Franklin and his staff, and run almost the same offense — but with Division I-caliber players.

Installing the future of football at Penn State took precision this offseason — it will still need tweaks throughout the year — which Moorhead in his meticulousness is well-suited to do.

Moorhead said his process of teaching the other coaches his scheme, from start to finish, went through general philosophy, then personnel, tempo, motions, defensive identification, then the run game, and finished with pass protection and pass game.

The offensive coordinator bundles his packages into “concepts” in which quick and unpredictable tweaks are made to very basic formations and plays in live situations.

“It’s how it’s packaged together,” said Franklin. “That’s a little bit different. The tempos are obviously a little bit different.”

Its speed is partially designed to help with production — Fordham ran an average of almost 70 plays per game last season (teams like Clemson and Baylor run the most in the FBS at about 80-84 plays per game) while putting up 453 yards of offense per game and scoring 56 touchdowns.

It’s so fast, in fact, that the first week of spring ball saw players on the offensive and defensive lines vomiting onto the turf between shotgun snaps.

“We’re doing tempo the other day, and you guys see we very rarely run after practice,” said Franklin in the spring. “And because of our tempo, we’re getting unbelievable conditioning. And the other day in the middle of a series, (defensive tackle) Robert Windsor threw up all over the place. I saw all the offensive guys’ eyes light up like, ‘Exactly. We got you now.’”

Still, as is fitting for a scheme speedy enough to run 15 or more plays in a 10-minute live period, it also had to be installed rapidly.

Legally, players have just 15 practices allowed by the NCAA in the spring, so from Moorhead’s arrival in December until March, the coaching staff spent its time studying up.

But that process was a bit different than the norm, too.

The players, still banned from sessions with coaches by NCAA spring regulations and without film of their own of this particular offense to study, watched cut-ups of the entirety of Fordham’s film (courtesy of the Rams) and scheduled unofficial meet-ups with each other to run through schemes under McSorley and a small group of veteran leaders.

Simultaneously, the Nittany Lions staff flew in Fordham’s current staff from the Bronx. This included new head coach Andrew Breiner, who had worked with Moorhead for almost 10 years at various stops and was promoted to the head position after serving as the Rams’ offensive coordinator.

“It was right before spring practice started,” said Breiner. “Coach Franklin and I had talked and he thought it would be great to have the offensive staff come out and sit down.”

At that point, Breiner said, the offense was already installed within the coaching staff.

Breiner has helped install this offense before, and while the overall process was the same as Moorhead had implemented at other stops, this time there was a twist — a whole host of coaches arriving after the fact to troubleshoot.

“We went through and watched (Fordham’s) entire last season, and went through the cut-ups, kind of a self-scout,” said Breiner. “Just looking at what we thought was good and what we thought was bad; what we (all) were going to try differently in the spring.”

After an overarching study, the staffs broke down into smaller groups, matching Penn State position coaches to Fordham position coaches.

“Those (Penn State) guys had some questions about the offense that just hadn’t come up yet, or didn’t come up when the whole staff was together,” Breiner said.

Such cooperation helped Breiner, a first-year head coach at only 31 years old, as well.

“It was a matter of sharing ideas,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily just us coaching them. Moorhead is a master at that. And I can tell you the Penn State offensive staff picked it up quickly, they’ve bought into it.”

The connection between the staffs continued through the summer as they joined for a satellite camp in New Jersey, and it’s one the two head coaches want to sustain — bonded by Moorhead and his offense.

“(Coach Franklin and I) definitely want to make that a couple-times-a-year thing, just sit down and share ideas about running virtually the same offense,” said Breiner.

While many staffs around the country fly in consultants during the offseason or individuals are flown elsewhere, it’s a rare occurrence that such in-depth troubleshooting sessions happen. The paranoia of head coaches, after all, knows no limits.

“Everybody is different. Some people are very old-school, very protective of their scheme,” said Breiner. “Others are, ‘Hey, the film is out there.’

“This is obviously unique in that there is unspoken trust between the two staffs.”

The depth of this particular overhaul and installation is, for Penn State, also unique. While some of the players on the team have been through two or more playbooks (and coaching changes) in the last four years, this one is the one that may ultimately stick.

It’ll be fast, flashy and modern. It’s a little borrowed, a little hectic, “simplistic sophistication” as Breiner and Moorhead are fond of saying. Like the product it will display on the field on Saturdays, it will have relied on many pieces coming together behind the scenes to bring it into being.

It’s different. Fresh.

After half a decade spent in upheaval and uncertainty, it might be exactly what Penn State football needs. 　

This story was originally published August 28, 2016 at 11:15 AM with the headline "Built for Speed: How Penn State football’s new offense came to be."