Film Study: Injury to Sean Clifford upends sterling defensive performance
The moment that Iowa linebacker Jack Campbell impacted Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford’s upper midsection, the fate of the game, and possibly the season, changed on a dime for the Nittany Lion football program.
I know this. You know this. Everyone knows this.
Without its starting signal-caller, who was having a very good game, despite the two interceptions he threw before exiting the contest with an undisclosed injury, Penn State was dead in the water.
Even the reasons for having no offensive output are obvious to Penn State fans. The Nittany Lions were an efficient and effective offense because of their starting quarterback. With no consistent ground game or big-play threats out of the backfield, Penn State had to put the ball in the hands of redshirt sophomore quarterback Ta'Quan Roberson.
How did things change after that fateful hit offensively? We’ll get to that, and how the Penn State defense almost pulled out a miracle in today’s film review of Penn State vs. Iowa.
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Precision-Adjacent
The play of the Penn State quarterback was critical to winning against the Iowa Hawkeyes. Is that painfully obvious? Yes, it is.
But the point is that in this game, if Sean Clifford didn’t play well, Penn State would not win.
The way Iowa is built places most of the pressure to win on the quarterback of the opposing team. Iowa’s front four is built with stopping the run in mind and only stopping the run.
The Hawkeyes linebackers are big, physical and disciplined and do not react downhill quickly because they know that they have the advantage in run support. Therefore they can patiently wait, avoid mistakes in coverage and force you to fit the ball into small windows in passing situations.
With Penn State’s strengths and weaknesses, it was a matchup that would be decided by the precision and decision-making of the Nittany Lion’s fifth-year quarterback, and things did not start well in that respect.
There’s no way around this, it’s a bad play.
It’s a two-man route that is covered and Clifford knows it right away. He tries to buy time outside of the pocket but that’s an absolute non-starter in the end zone. In the end, I think this was a throw-away that went haywire but either way, it was a catastrophic start to the game.
Before we get to the good, let’s examine the other interception and rip the band-aid off right now.
Iowa is running a cover four shell that Penn State is trying to attack. They want to get the safety to bite on a double move. Even if he doesn’t fully bite on the route, the goal is to create space between him and the cornerback so that Jahan Dotson can split the zones and have a shot at a contested catch.
The problem is that, as we said earlier, Iowa is not going to make mistakes like that. Jack Koerner is in a good position, even if Dotson runs a post route and then breaks on the vertical adjustment to be in a great position.
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