The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: Reviewing Penn State’s 56-21 win over Illinois
After Penn State beat Illinois on Saturday night at Beaver Stadium to capture its fourth consecutive win, sophomore linebacker Brandon Smith spoke candidly about how his team turned things around after a program-worst 0-5 start to the season.
The Nittany Lions had lost games in all kinds of ways — from last-second heartbreakers to complete blowouts. A group that was supposed to finally get over the hump and make a push for a College Football Playoff appearance was left only with the idea of what could’ve been.
Still, Penn State demonstrated resilience, sticking together and ending the 2020 season with a 56-21 rout of an over-matched Fighting Illini squad.
“We were just basically saying, ‘Enough is enough,’” Smith said. “Like that one kid who gets bullied. He has enough of it and just stands up to the bully. That’s kinda like the mindset that we had — that ‘Enough was enough, and we’re not gonna take this anymore.’”
On Saturday night, the Nittany Lions played the role of the bully. After a back-and-forth first quarter, they took complete control of the contest, outscoring Illinois 35-0 in the final three quarters.
Senior safety Lamont Wade said the team came to an important realization after opening the season with five consecutive losses.
“The way we stick together — the way we hang off the field, how cool we are — that all played a factor in us realizing like, ‘Yo, OK, we’re 0-5, but this isn’t who we are,’” Wade said. “‘We gotta start being who we are.’ And we were able to settle into that and started to look like more of who we are.”
GOOD
WR Jahan Dotson’s career day: Whether it was the fact that he was only named third-team All Big Ten earlier in the week despite leading the conference in receiving yards or something else, junior receiver Jahan Dotson was motivated from the opening kickoff Saturday night.
The 5-foot-11, 182-pound Nazareth native again showed the college football world why he deserves to be in conversation as one of the best receivers in the country. He finished with six catches for 189 receiving yards and two touchdowns.
On the very first play of the night, Dotson caught a short pass from redshirt junior quarterback Sean Clifford near the left sideline and zipped past one Illinois defensive back before finding the open field. He turned the simple hitch route into a 75-yard touchdown — putting the Nittany Lions on the board just 12 seconds into the contest.
Then, at the start of the second quarter, Dotson returned a punt 50 yards to allow Penn State to start its drive at Illinois’ 10-yard line. Freshman running back Caziah Holmes found the end zone two plays later to reclaim the Nittany Lions’ lead. Penn State never looked back.
Toward the end of the first half, Dotson came up big with another explosive play. He caught another short pass from Clifford and raced down the right sideline, running into the end zone untouched for a 70-yard touchdown to give Penn State a 21-point lead at halftime.
Dotson ended the first half with 183 receiving yards, a mark that was just 33 yards shy of the Nittany Lions’ program record for most receiving yards in a single game. And though he didn’t break the record — only adding 6 receiving yards in the second half, as Penn State took its foot off the gas — Dotson’s performance was one of the best ever by a receiver in school history.
The junior — who finishes 2020 with 52 catches for 884 yards and eight touchdowns — now must make the decision to either return for his senior season or declare for the NFL Draft.
RB Caziah Holmes scores the first two TDs of his career: After spending majority of the season behind sophomore running back Devyn Ford and freshman running back Keyvone Lee in Penn State’s running back rotation, freshman running back Caziah Holmes finally had a breakout game on Saturday.
Holmes finished with career highs in carries, rushing yards and touchdowns. The 5-foot-11, 209-pound Florida native ran for 77 yards and two scores on 12 carries.
His first touchdown — on a 3-yard rush — came in the first minute of the second quarter and allowed Penn State to regain the lead for good. After Dotson’s 50-yard punt return brought the Nittany Lions down to the Fighting Illini’s 10-yard line, Holmes ran the ball back-to-back times before scoring.
And when Penn State was trying to milk the rest of the clock with a 28-point lead midway through the fourth quarter, Holmes found another opportunity to score. On a 10-play drive that started with 8:41 left in the game and lasted over five minutes, the freshman ran the ball six times for 49 yards before ultimately finding the end zone on a 1-yard run to give the Nittany Lions’ their final points of the contest with 3:32 remaining.
Penn State’s running back room should be even more crowded next season with sophomore running back Noah Cain healthy and Ford and Lee still in the mix. Still, Holmes — a former four-star prospect — has shown that he can be a legitimate contributor to the team’s rushing attack.
Before Saturday, Holmes’ career high was 50 rushing yards in the Nittany Lions’ Week 4 loss to Nebraska.
He finishes the 2020 season with only 227 rushing yards on 51 attempts. But more importantly, Holmes ended the year on a high note with momentum he can carry into his sophomore campaign.
QB Will Levis throws his first TD pass of the season: It was established in Penn State’s Week 6 win over Michigan that Clifford would be the team’s starting quarterback and redshirt sophomore quarterback Will Levis would be used situationally. But whenever Levis checked into games after that, he would seldom get opportunities to throw the ball.
It became too predictable that a quarterback draw was coming any time Levis entered games. In the Nittany Lions’ last two wins, though, Levis was finally given chances to throw. And on Saturday against the Fighting Illini, it paid off — the 6-foot-3, 222-pound Connecticut native threw his first touchdown pass of the season.
On 4th-and-1 from Illinois’ 7-yard line, with 20 seconds left in the third quarter, Levis surprised most people watching by throwing instead of bulldozing his way past the first-down marker.
He dropped back and hit redshirt freshman tight end Brenton Strange to his right, and Strange slipped away from a tackle before diving for the pylon to score. The touchdown pass was the third of Levis’ career, after he threw two last season.
This season, Levis finishes with 55 pass attempts, compared to 82 rushing attempts. He ends 2020 completing 60 percent (33-55) of his passes for 421 yards and a touchdown, while adding 260 yards and three touchdowns on the ground.
From the Nittany Lions’ win over the Wolverines in Week 6 until their Week 8 matchup against Michigan State, Levis had run the ball 23 times through two games without a single pass attempt. But head coach James Franklin showed that he was willing to mix things up with Levis also throwing in recent weeks.
It’s unclear how Penn State will use Levis in next season, but if it incorporates him into the offense again, it’ll need to allow the backup to throw a bit more to keep defenses guessing.
BAD
QB Sean Clifford’s first-quarter fumble: During Penn State’s four-game winning streak to close out the season, Clifford reduced the amount of times he turned the ball over.
Through the Nittany Lions’ first five games of the season, Clifford had thrown eight interceptions and had two fumbles returned for touchdowns. These mistakes often buried his team into early holes it couldn’t dig itself out of.
But headed into Saturday’s season finale against Illinois, Clifford had only turned the ball over once (an interception against Rutgers in Week 7) since Penn State’s Week 6 win over Michigan. That was until his fumble early in the contest versus the Fighting Illini.
On the first play of the Nittany Lions’ second drive of the game, Clifford faked a handoff to Lee before keeping it himself. He ran past the first-down marker, but he didn’t take care of the football, and Illinois took advantage. Fighting Illini defensive back Devon Witherspoon forced the ball loose with his helmet and recovered the possession at Penn State’s 16-yard line.
Obviously, the fumble didn’t prove too costly, since the Nittany Lions ended up running away with the game by 35 points. But the Fighting Illini did score four plays after forcing the turnover to tie the game at seven with 11:06 left in the first quarter.
That was the type of miscue that got Clifford benched in Week 4 against Nebraska. And if he hopes to be Penn State’s starting quarterback in 2021 — assuming Franklin and Co. don’t try to land a replacement in the transfer portal — Clifford will need to clean up his play.
UGLY
Slow start on defense: Early in Saturday’s matchup with Illinois, it seemed as if Penn State’s defense had reverted back to performing with a lack of energy out of the gate.
Poor first-half defensive performances had plagued the Nittany Lions for most of the year. In their 0-5 start to the season, they trailed by at least 10 points at the end of each first half. Even in last week’s win over Michigan State, Penn State’s defense came out flat, which was part of the reason why the Nittany Lions were in an 11-point hole at the break in that contest.
Against the Fighting Illini, Penn State gave up big plays early — allowing a beat-up and undermanned Illinois team to score 21 first-quarter points.
On Illinois’ second touchdown drive of the night, Fighting Illini quarterback Isaiah Williams faked a handoff to running back Chase Brown before taking off himself for a 64-yard rush. He got all the way down to the Nittany Lions’ 11-yard line before finally being shoved out of bounds by senior safety Jaquan Brisker. And two plays later, Brown found the end zone on a 12-yard run to tie up the game at 14 with 9:50 to play in the first quarter.
Then, after Penn State went three-and-out on its next drive, Illinois capitalized off of decent field position. Starting at their own 37-yard line, it took the Fighting Illini only four plays before they scored again — this time, on a 38-yard touchdown pass from Williams to tight end Daniel Barker. The score gave Illinois a 21-14 lead with about six minutes to go in the opening quarter.
The Nittany Lions defense did tighten up soon after, though. After the first quarter, Penn State outscored Illinois 35-0, and it also outgained Illinois in total yards 424-74 in that stretch.
Still, Penn State will need to solve its problem of slow defensive starts by the time the 2021 season kicks off if it hopes for a more successful campaign next fall.
