The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Penn State’s 28-16 loss to Michigan

I got this strange feeling while watching Penn State and Michigan warm up on separate sides of the field, from my lofty view in the press box at Beaver Stadium on Saturday.

Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh was warming up on the field with his players; specifically, he was taking snaps under center from a grad assistant and then throwing, at first, short, then deep balls to his receivers and tight ends. Then, Harbaugh, wearing black cleats, sticky-fingered receiver gloves and his signature khakis, moved to the end zone to take snaps out of shotgun and hand off to his running backs.

It could be because Harbaugh likes being out there; revels in the joy of throwing a spiral long after his days at quarterback have ended, or it could be because he’s so type-A that he doesn’t trust his team to warm up without him, or it could be both of those things.

But, from my perspective it felt like there was a connection building there, like he was preparing his players and himself for the contest and daring them to match his intensity even in warmups — but with his actions, not his words.

I had this nagging feeling then, as I sat there staring at the divided field, both teams warming up on their respective sides, that I hadn’t seen that before, not in my meager seven months covering Penn State football in practice.

I’ve heard themes and messages repeated a million times from many mouths in postgame press conferences and seen the pregame high-fives and pass-by butt-slaps as James Franklin makes his routine rounds through the mass of players warming up and stretching, but never that. After all, “being on the same page” is different than a connection.

It’s highly possible; likely, even, that in the world outside what the media sees and inside the locker room and during practices that that exists — but in even the rawest interactions of a head coach and his players on a field before a game, I simply haven’t seen it.

Harbaugh is not exactly “on-message”, for lack of a better term. He shows that every week with his stream-of-consciousness quotes and his apoplectic tantrums on the field. When he feels something, he shows it; even if it’s a wide-mouthed, narrow-eyed gape at someone he doesn’t much care for. Kind of a loose cannon, even when I first met him in the suit-and-tie manicured environment at Big Ten Media Days in July.

His players seem to love it. After reading over transcripts and watching accounts from the visitors on Saturday night, the passion and intensity of players like quarterback Jake Rudock and tight end Jake Butt dripped off the respective pages and screens. That intensity had stayed at its peak throughout the game, despite the fact that Michigan had just ground through a double-overtime win the week before and faced a team off its bye.

“He’s just an animated guy, really, in anything he does,” said Butt, when asked about Harbaugh after the game. “He’s just a leader, he’s our head coach. Everyone on the team would follow him no matter what…He’s made it as hard as possible in spring ball and camp, he’s just pushed us to our limit. He’s tried to find where we have little cracks, and he’s pushed us to our limits. So when it comes down to these adverse times, we’ve already been there and faced that adversity already.”

“(We would) follow him into a fire,” added Rudock.

Maybe that starts in the warm-ups; as Harbaugh, under center or in shotgun, locks eyes with each one of his players and dares them to meet his expectations.

The Good

▪ Fleeting observation aside, it’s hard to know where to start breaking down the various aspects of a game decided by missed opportunities on offense, and missed tackles that led to explosive plays on defense and special teams.

But a big positive that can be gleaned from the loss is the apparent return to full health of linebacker Brandon Bell.

Bell had been banged up early in the season and was spelled often on the sideline after missing some time and easing back into health. The bye week seemed to do wonders for him. On Saturday, he picked off Rudock and returned the interception 25 yards before getting pushed out of bounds, and sack-and-stripped the quarterback for a loss of seven yards, and recovered the resulting fumble.

“I was looking straight down the middle,” Bell said of his interception. “We call it poaching off the backside from the boundary to the field...The quarterback never sees the backside linebacker.”

▪ Von Walker blocked Michigan punter Blake O’Neill’s attempt, and became the first player to do so since 2012.

The Bad

▪ Even without tallying up the entirety of the game, Penn State had around 10 missed tackles in the first half alone and five missed tackles on special teams as Jourdan Lewis broke free for a 55-yard return to the Penn State 40-yard line. The explosive run ultimately led to a Michigan touchdown.

The team’s goal is to have no more than 11 missed tackles per game, according to Franklin, so not more than one per position.

“A lot of times, guys are trying to run off blocks or just not cleaning blocks before making tackles,” said linebacker Jason Cabinda. “So guys are still hanging onto them when they’re trying to make that tackle, and all of that comes back down to fundamentals.”

Cabinda added that he didn’t think tackling was the biggest issue of the defense, which allowed 343 yards against, but instead cited a lack of communication as being the major problem with Saturday’s performance.

“Tackling is always something you bring every Saturday, but I say communication,” added Bell. “They do a lot of basic things. It’s kind of like a smoke show. They do a lot of motions and stuff, but run the basic plays. We have to do better.”

▪ The pushback achieved by Michigan’s defensive line against Penn State’s offensive line was a big factor in freshman running back Saquon Barkley’s game, as well as quarterback Christian Hackenberg’s.

Barkley slipped through a sizeable hole early for a 56-yard run, but after that, barely found anywhere to go against Michigan’s top-10 rush defense. He ran for 85 yards, but was knocked back enough to lose 17 and finished with 68 net yards on 15 carries.

Hackenberg was sacked four times for 26 yards — though to be fair, on one occasion he had a shot to get rid of the ball and did not.

“You could tell toward the end that he was flinching at the end of his throws, ducking to try and get out of the way,” said Michigan senior defensive end Chris Wormley. “That was the goal all along, to get to the quarterback and apply pressure to him.”

Left tackle Paris Palmer was even spelled in the third quarter and Andrew Nelson was moved to left tackle. Palmer came back in when Penn State loaded up the left side on the Michigan 3-yard line, with Derek Dowrey in as a stagger lineman on that side. The goal was to push left so Barkley could get through; instead there was nowhere for the back to go and he ran right. He lost 3 yards on the play.

▪ The failed attempt was followed by an overthrow of Kyle Carter by Hackenberg on third down, from the 6-yard line. Franklin decided to go for a field goal.

“In that situation, we were going to have to score a touchdown and go for two,” he said. “Or, (we would) have to kick the field goal and score later in the game. That was the discussion in the headset with all the coaches, to get the points now, or go for a touchdown or have to go for two.

“And at that point, we had had a hard time ... we’d had a bunch of big plays that got us down to the low red zone and we had a hard time punching it in. So at that point, we felt like it was in our team’s best interest.”

Penn State settled for three field goals in three red zone trips. The first came when Barkley was stuffed inside the 10, the second was the aforementioned play and the third was after Hackenberg moved the ball down the field himself with a 6-yard keeper, was helped out by a 15-yard Michigan penalty, rushed for 17 more yards, then hit Barkley on a 14-yard reception. Brandon Polk was caught up at the 1-yard line on the sweep and Hackenberg threw two incompletions to send out the field goal unit.

“The biggest mistake was not capitalizing in the red zone,” said tight end Brent Wilkerson. “We took field goals instead of touchdowns.”

▪ Penn State converted on three of 14 third-down attempts, and sits firmly as the second-worst in the country through 11 games this season at 27.6 percent.

The Ugly

Hackenberg took his 101st sack in three years on Saturday afternoon. He has been taken down 80 times in the last two years alone.

This story was originally published November 22, 2015 at 9:37 PM with the headline "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Penn State’s 28-16 loss to Michigan."