Without in-person practice, Penn State football OC Kirk Ciarrocca uses quizzes to teach players
Kirk Ciarrocca may be working from home during the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, but that doesn’t mean he’s working any less. The Penn State offensive coordinator starts his workday at 7 a.m. and keeps going until he’s completed his daily tasks, usually well past 5 p.m.
“My wife said the other day, she’s like, ‘Geez, you seem to be working more now than ever this time of year,’” Ciarrocca said Tuesday morning on a teleconference with the media. “I’ve been really busy with the football (side) of things ... Everything takes longer to do right now when you’re doing it remotely.”
Part of Ciarrocca’s work week, if not most of it, is spent working on the installation of his offense. The offensive coordinator had limited time to teach his new players his scheme before the pandemic forced the coaching staff and team to disperse back to their respective homes.
Now he must teach the players how he wants to play with the football without getting to work with them in person. They’re forced to commit the scheme to memory without getting to feel how it works on the field. That involves meeting with his players throughout the day and maximizing the eight hours per week he’s allotted to do so.
Ciarrocca will need his players to know his offense if he wants to get the most out of their ability.
Since he can’t judge their knowledge based on their play, he’s judging it in a way most teachers already do.
“One of the ways we’re getting feedback is (sending) them a quiz on the material we just went over,” he said. “You can really kind of grade yourself as a teacher. If the guys all bomb the quiz, you have to look at yourself and say, ‘Shoot I did not do a great job presenting this material. What was wrong with my presentation here?’ ... (I’m) really pleased with what we’ve been getting back from the players from a quiz standpoint, so they’re obviously grasping the material.”
Fortunately for Ciarrocca and the Nittany Lions, there shouldn’t be a lot to teach. The former Minnesota offensive coordinator was plucked from the Golden Gophers, in part, because of the similarities between his scheme and the scheme Penn State had in place before his arrival.
“We’ve kind of merged it all,” Franklin said on an earlier teleconference. “There’s probably only one new scheme that we haven’t done before. There’s some tweaks to things that we’ve done, but there’s probably only one specific scheme that we’re gonna be running that’s gonna be a major part of our offense that we haven’t run in the past.”
It’s easy to see why the Penn State head coach would want the scheme’s blended instead of overhauling his offense. The Nittany Lions finished with the No. 13 offense in the country, while Minnesota finished at No. 7, according to ESPN’s Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings. SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency.
Finding the best ideas from both schemes could greatly improve the offense and allow Penn State to maximize its talent, which is Ciarrocca’s goal.
“I knew our philosophies were in line,” he said. “We’ve just built a system that we feel like will put our players in the best positions to be successful and taking advantage of the talents and skill sets that we have at Penn State, which is always your goal, no matter where you’re coaching at.”
Ciarrocca said his jargon has been completely overhauled in his new job, to the point that his Minnesota players wouldn’t understand it if he was to try to run it with them. His flexibility with the offense and his pursuit of talent-maximization doesn’t end there.
The offensive coordinator plans to use his quarterbacks as runners more than he did at Minnesota.
“We’d be crazy not to run our quarterbacks,” he said. “That’s one of the things that they do really well and one of their strengths is their athleticism. So we’re going to continue to do that. I just think that you have to be prudent with it.”
Those quarterbacks will be central to Ciarrocca’s success at Penn State. He was able to find success at Minnesota because of the way he transformed their quarterback, Tanner Morgan.
Morgan passed for 3,253 yards, 30 touchdowns and only seven interceptions as a redshirt sophomore who came into the program as the No. 44 pro-style quarterback in the 2017 recruiting class, according to the 247Sports Composite rankings.
He’ll be tasked with a similar duty with redshirt junior quarterback Sean Clifford next season, who arrived at Penn State as the No. 8 pro-style quarterback in the same class as Morgan, but threw for 599 fewer yards and seven fewer touchdowns last season while tossing the same numbers of interceptions. The Nittany Lions will go as far as Clifford can take them, and he’ll need to take the next step to help his team reach new heights.
If Ciarrocca’s work with Morgan is any indication, he should have Clifford on the right track. It’s just a matter of when they’ll get to work together in person.
