Joe Moorhead has arrived on Penn State‘s campus and, like he did at Fordham, he is poised to drastically and immediately improve the offense. While Penn State has maintained winning records, and had relative success despite deep sanctions since 2011, the offenses of the last two years have been abysmal.
Due to the poor offensive production, head coach James Franklin made a drastic change this offseason to fire offensive coordinator John Donovan and replace him with Joe Moorhead, previously Fordham’s head coach. This article will explore what we can expect from Moorhead in terms of transforming the statistical performance of the Penn State offense with a focus on the upcoming 2016 season.
Joe Moorhead is Going to Make the Penn State Offense Great Again
Analytical Overview
For statistical analysis, we’ll focus on two areas – yards per game (YPG) and points per game (PPG). While these two stats may not directly translate to wins, every Penn State football fan will tell you that the offensive production under Franklin and Donovan has been a key area, along with special teams, holding the program back. We won’t only consider these numbers on an absolute basis but instead will explore the YPG and PPG against FBS (for Penn State) and FCS (for Fordham while Moorhead was head coach) averages to try and normalize the value that we might expect Moorhead to bring to Penn State. We will call these values YPGVA and PPGVA – yards per game versus average and points per game versus average (large positive numbers are good; numbers near zero are average; and negative numbers are below average). All stats are from Yahoo!.
Penn State Offense 2011 – 2015
We’ll start with Penn State’s performance from 2011 to 2015. In 2011, Joe Paterno’s last year, the FBS YPG average was 392 per game. Penn State performed below average at a production of 345 YPG (-47 YPGVA; ranked 102 in FBS YPG).
In 2012, the first year with Bill O’Brien as the head coach, and with walk on Matt McGloin as the starting QB, they showed significant improvement and were slightly above average (57th ranked; +8.9 YPGVA). A year later, Christian Hackenberg started as a true freshman under O’Brien, and the production was even better at 433 YPG (46th ranked; +20 YPGVA). The 2012 production is important. It shows that, even with a walk on quarterback and the pressure and challenges that came with the sanctions, progress can be made nearly immediately.
It’s very easy to see that under Paterno and Franklin, the scoring production was poor. In fact, in 2014 under Franklin and Donovan the Nittany Lions had the worst scoring offense in the Big Ten and was 11th in 2015. During the two year O’Brien tenure, they performed right around the average. Again, a big uptick versus the last year of the Paterno era that was erased after O’Brien left Happy Valley.
So, it would appear James Franklin did the right thing and moved on from John Donovan to hire some new blood. Then John Donovan took over the offense and the wheels completely fell off. In 2014, Penn State produced 326 YPG (118th ranked and -85 YPGVA). That’s a swing of -100 yards every game against the rest of FBS and the year previous. Maybe you say, it takes over a year to install a system and surely Donovan was better in 2015. You’d be correct, if you consider “better”, ranking 106 out of 128 and being 66 yards per game below the FBS average. At that pace, Penn State would’ve been average in about 2020.
But what about points you say? You’re right, having poor yardage doesn’t necessarily mean a team can’t score at a high rate without yardage potency. Again though, Penn State was poor to middling. The table below summarizes Penn State’s per game rank (PPG) against FBS, absolute PPG, and PPGVA.
Joe Moorhead’s Fordham Transformation
Let’s switch gears and discuss the recent history of Fordham and Joe Moorhead. In 2011, the year before Moorhead’s first season there, the Rams weren’t very good offensively. The FCS average for YPG was 359. Fordham was below average and had the 96th ranked offense with a production of 315 YPG (-44 YPGVA). In contrast, Jackson State had the top offensive production at 490 YPG.
Moorhead came to town in 2012 and everything changed. Immediately, the Fordham offense became a significantly above average performer against the rest of FCS. The table below shows how Fordham improved immediately in 2012. Not only was there immediate improvement but it was sustained for the entirety of Moorhead’s tenure. Fordham went from the 96th ranked offense in 2011 to the 17th ranked offense in 2012 with a +70 YPGVA.
Moorhead improved Fordham by 121 yards per game in year one. Not only did he improve Fordham but he maintained it for his entire tenure. In fact, 2015 was his “worst” year and they ranked 18th and finished +81 YPGVA. When we look at the PPG stats, the transformation was even more dramatic. Pre-Moorhead Fordham, in 2011, was actually worst at producing points than John Donovan’s Nittany Lions with a value of 13.2 PPG (-12.8 PPGVA). Then, like we saw above with YPG ranks and YPGVA, there was immediate and sustained improvement for scoring.
Moorhead’s teams ranked no worse than 28th for PPG across the four year sample size with a peak of fifth in 2014. What’s more is that the offensive production was over ten PPGVA which is 15 PPG higher than Penn State had in 2015.
What Can We Expect Going Forward?
So, we’ve established in two cases that offensive production can be turned around quickly and one instance where Joe Moorhead has personally done it. So, let’s do some wild extrapolation to predict Penn State’s offensive production in 2016.
Let’s start with Penn State’s 2015 performance of 344 YPG and 23.7 PPG as baseline and we’ll also assume that 2016 FBS offenses will be the same average production as 2015 (410 YPG and 29.4 PPG). On a yards per game basis, Moorhead’s first year at Fordham yielded +70 YPGVA. For Penn State to reach that level in 2016, Moorhead will have to improve Penn State’s offense by 136 YPG over 2015, and would produce 480 YPG. That equates to a 40% production increase. It may seem like a big hurdle, and it certainly is, except when you consider that he improved Fordham by 38% in 2012 versus 2011 numbers.
So, it would appear that this is possible, and success like this would immediately rank Penn State among the top two offenses in the Big Ten (in 2015, Indiana produced the most yards at 491 per game). Even a production improvement of 20%, to 413 yards per game, would rank fourth in the Big Ten and 58th overall – only slightly above average but still a big improvement versus the years prior.
Again, a 20 – 40% bump in yardage production may seem large but he’s done it already and when Bill O’Brien took over (with a walk-on quarterback and the shock of sanctions), the offense improved 21% on a yards per game basis. In points per game, Moorhead’s first year saw an increase in scoring of 136% (31.2 versus 13.2).
Maybe this is a bit ambitious so for the sake of argument, we’ll assume he can get the Nittany Lions to a respectable +5.7 PPGVA as he did with the Rams in 2012. For this, Penn State will need to produce at a rate of 35.1 PPG and generate an increase in points of 48% versus 2015. This again would put Penn State very near the top of the Big Ten (in 2015, Indiana scored at a rate of 36.2 PPG and Ohio State 35.0 PPG). Even making Penn State an average scoring offense would put them in the mix of Michigan, Iowa, and Michigan State – all contending teams in 2015.
The optimism is riding high in Happy Valley going into the 2016 season. Bringing on a fresh coordinator, with a proven offensive scheme, seems to have the program heading in the right direction. Translating the success he had at Fordham to Penn State will be no small feat. Certainly there are question marks that remain, most notably around quarterback and offensive line. But given the fact that he’s done it before, other coaches have done it at this school before, the loaded talent at the skill positions, and a new offensive line scheme there is no reason to believe that Moorhead and the Nittany Lion offense will not be poised for a breakout season in 2016.
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