How can Penn State football defeat Iowa on the road? Here are Saturday’s 2 key matchups
Penn State football is set for its most difficult matchup of the season to this point when it heads on the road this week. The No. 4 Nittany Lions will travel to Iowa City to take on the No. 3 Iowa Hawkeyes in a hostile environment at Kinnick Stadium.
Both teams will enter the game 5-0 overall and 2-0 in the Big Ten with their respective top five rankings on the line. The game matches up two of the best defenses in the country with plenty on the line as the early playoff picture begins to take shape.
Let’s take a look at the two key matchups in Saturday’s 4 p.m. ET kickoff between Penn State and Iowa.
Jon Sauber: Iowa’s running game vs. Penn State’s run defense
This is where the game starts for the Nittany Lions. Iowa relies on running the ball to set up the rest of its offense and occasionally it makes up its entire offense. The Hawkeyes have been able to work their way up and down the field in their first five games because they’ve forced opponents to pay special attention to the run and specifically to starting running back Tyler Goodson and his backup, Ivory Kelly-Martin.
Iowa has played the same way for years and, outside of a few quarters last week against Maryland, that hasn’t changed this year. The Hawkeyes like to wear defenses down with their overpowering offensive line and grind the ball into dirt with their running backs. This year, Goodson and Kelly-Martin have been tasked with doing that and have had reasonable success. The duo has 131 carries for 583 yards and five touchdowns on the ground this season and helps set up starting quarterback Spencer Petras to throw the ball when the opponent is expecting the run.
Defenses are forced to commit more defenders closer to the line of scrimmage in anticipation of the run, making it harder to get downfield when the Hawkeyes opt to pass.
Penn State will need to show it can handle Goodson and Kelly-Martin to earn the win Saturday. The Nittany Lions can choose to stack the box and put the ball in Petras’ hands in order to win, but an even more optimal outcome would be to show they can stop the running backs without dedicating extra players to the run. If they can do that, Petras will not only have to throw, but he’ll have to throw with more defenders dropping into coverage.
The junior quarterback has been good his last three games, but the first two games of his season against good defenses should be more representative of how he’ll play against Penn State. In those games against Indiana and Iowa State, Petras completed 50% of his 48 passes for only 251 total yards.
That’s the quarterback the Nittany Lions want to see this week, and if they defend the run as well as they’re capable of, there’s a good chance they can force Petras into a situation where he has to do more than he’s capable of for his team to win.
Stopping Goodson and the Iowa running game may not guarantee victory, but it gives Penn State its best chance of putting Petras and the Iowa offense in a compromised position Saturday evening.
Kyle J. Andrews: Penn State DL P.J. Mustipher vs Iowa C Tyler Linderbaum
Both Penn State’s defensive front and Iowa’s offensive line play a physical brand of football, and at the head of their hard-nosed play are Nittany Lions defensive lineman P.J. Mustipher and Iowa center Tyler Linderbaum. Not only are the two players highly respected by fans of both programs, but they are both former high school wrestlers and the two have garnered the respect of Penn State head coach James Franklin.
“It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of P.J. Mustipher the football player, the student-athlete, the young man and the leader in our program,” Franklin said in his Tuesday press conference. “He does everything right. Their center (Linderbaum) is as good as I’ve seen. His athleticism, his ability to pull and run and get out on the edge, the mentality he plays with, it’s really impressive. That’s gonna be an interesting matchup and battle throughout the game. Got a ton of respect for both of them. That’ll be an interesting matchup that I think will play a big part in this game, in who is successful and who is not.”
Mustipher was a three-time letter winner for McDonogh School (Md.) with the fastest pin in school history. Wrestling at the 285-pound heavyweight level, he claimed a Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association title in 2017 and 2018 and was ranked as the best in his weight class. The Penn State defensive lineman went 39-8 with 15 pins in 2017, being named to the Baltimore Sun All-Metro first-team and was a finalist for Athlete of the Year by the publication.
Linderbaum went 53-10 as a junior and finished fifth in the state tournament as a heavyweight in Iowa. He even pinned current Tampa Bay Buccaneers left tackle Triston Wirfs. The current Iowa center’s competitiveness has been noted by Blake Williams, his former high school wrestling coach.
“I don’t think I could take another athlete that I’ve coached that had a will to win like Tyler, or maybe I should say a refusal to lose,” Williams said in the Daily Iowan. “That might be better because he won a lot of wrestling matches just from refusing to lose. He hated [losing] . . . No matter what he’s doing, he’s competitive. I bet if you ask his older brother, oh boy, those two would probably have stories of playing you name it.”
In five offensive starts, Linderbaum has been at the forefront of an offensive line that’s averaged 126 yards per game on the ground. The 6-3, 290-pound center has 91.1 run blocking grade, per Pro Football Focus and a total grade of 89.8, as the highest-graded center in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Mustipher, standing at 6-4, 326 pounds, has a rush defense grade of 78.2 and a total defensive grade of 74.6, which is 89th in the country. Penn State as a whole has allowed 110.8 yards on the ground on defense.
