‘We looked like ourselves’: Brent Pry details how Penn State’s defense flipped a switch
Brent Pry looked out onto the field at SHI Stadium last Saturday and finally saw the product he’d grown accustomed to seeing the past six years.
Penn State’s seventh-year defensive coordinator watched as his Nittany Lions defense held Rutgers to 205 yards of total offense and 12 first downs in a 23-7 win. The unit gang tackled, swarmed to the ball and played aggressively — all trademarks of Pry’s defenses in years past.
“That was the first game where I felt like we looked like ourselves,” Pry said Thursday, during his first meeting with reporters since the season began.
Though his defense seems to have turned a corner these last two weeks — it held Michigan to less than 300 yards of total offense in a Week 6 win, too — the glaring issues of the group throughout Penn State’s 0-5 start are hard to ignore.
During the Nittany Lions five-game losing streak, Pry’s defense looked out of sorts at times. Penn State gave up over 350 yards to an opponent three times in that stretch and had been outscored 117-33 in those five first halves. The unit routinely missed tackles and punched at the ball instead of wrapping up.
The lack of a traditional offseason to prepare because of the pandemic certainly contributed to the issues. As did the inexperience of the Nittany Lions’ defense.
Pry pointed to the fact that key defensive players such as redshirt sophomore defensive end Jayson Oweh, junior linebacker Jesse Luketa, redshirt junior linebacker Ellis Brooks and senior safety Jaquan Brisker hadn’t started before this season.
“We had a bunch of guys that were first-year starters that didn’t get a spring and didn’t get a full camp and didn’t get to go out there and have a couple games before we got into Big Ten play,” Pry said.
But Pry didn’t want to make excuses. He knows it falls on him to make sure his group is performing to the best of its ability.
The Altoona native said that he should’ve simplified the defensive scheme sooner than he did. Pry added that the unit was “trying to do too much” for the better part of its first five games until he made a change.
“Then when a little adversity hit … we just had guys out of gaps and trying to make plays outside the framework,” Pry said. “And no, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t play good defense that way.”
Since scaling things back, though, the improvement has been evident. Last week, the Nittany Lions allowed the Scarlet Knights to average just 2.6 yards per rush and complete only 18 of their 32 pass attempts.
Rutgers — a team that had scored at least 20 points in all of its six games prior to last Saturday — didn’t score its lone touchdown of the contest until late in the third quarter.
Pry was pleased as he watched from the sidelines — he finally saw the strides his unit had made come to fruition.
But with only two games left in the regular season and the NCAA allowing players an extra year of eligibility because of the pandemic, he’s excited about the future just as much as he is about the next couple of weeks.
“You talk about Brisker potentially coming back and guys like (senior cornerback Tariq) Castro-Fields — guys that didn’t have the season they wanted or hoped and are excited about what the future could hold,” Pry said. “I think that’s where this thing is.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 5:35 PM.
