The wrong kind of statement game for Penn State

ANN ARBOR – This game, officially out of hand, Michigan already doubling up on Penn State’s 17 points with the fourth quarter just started, the public address announcer in the Michigan Stadium press box intoned, “Drew Allar has entered the game for Penn State.”

Some Penn State fans, even some former Nittany Lions players, tend to ask: Should Allar, the five-star freshman, the clear QB of the future, now ever leave the field?

The correct answer after watching this one: What do you have against Allar?

» READ MORE: Michigan takes out Penn State, 41-17

Sean Clifford gets little to none of the blame for Michigan’s 41-17 dismantling in a first half that was straight weird. A second half featuring Wolverines dominance, Penn State’s D worn down and eventually out, Michigan scoring so quickly a couple of times that Wolverines defensive end Mike Morris remembers being a bit put off about going back on the field so soon: “I love you, good job, but …”

A big day in the Big House proved No. 10-ranked Penn State’s line play simply was not ready for the big time, on offense or defense. Michigan never even punted.

Penn State head coach James Franklin started his postgame presser saying, “We did not control the line of scrimmage on either side of the ball.”

Later, Franklin said, “15-play drives, 12-play drives, 16-play drives.” He wasn’t talking about his squad.

Whether the No. 5-ranked Wolverines are talented enough to compete with the likes of Ohio State and be a factor on the national stage is to be determined on other days.

“Call it a statement game?” Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said right after this one. “Ok, call it a statement game.”

In the first half, Penn State actually stopped Michigan three times in the red zone. Yes, this score could have been worse. If you watched, you saw massive holes, missed tackles, missed angles, all the ways Michigan’s rushing yardage added up to 418.

Back to Allar. You saw the freshman had no time to operate and no easy targets after he got out there. “Sean got hurt,” Franklin simply said when asked about the change.

There is a marquee freshman who does start for Penn State, of course. Tailback Nick Singleton was also no factor here. Six carries for 19 yards.

Clifford still is the best QB to face Ohio State in two weeks. The easy call is to wait until after that game to decide on any change at starter. Why throw Allar to those wolves? (After that, all bets are off.)

The weirdest stat of the first half: One Penn State first down, two touchdowns.

One Nits score was a double carom of a pick-6, a Penn State arm, then a Michigan shoulder … a Nittany Lions linebacker grabbed that attempted screen, running 47 yards to the house.

Several plays before, Penn State had already seemed dead in the water, before Clifford took off all by his lonesome for a 62-yard run, eventually chased down at the 2-yard line, setting up the first Penn State score.

Morris attributed a couple of “lucky” plays – a missed gap assignment, that weird double bounce – “take away three plays and it’s 41-3.”

That’s not the way it works, of course. But Morris was not wrong on this: “Take out three plays, we were good.”

That’s the “give credit to the other guys” side of the ledger. Franklin did that himself. But when Audrey Snyder of The Athletic asked him – after first noting that Franklin had said this week that this game would be “big-boy football” – why did Franklin feel that the trenches were a problem?

“Yeah, it’s all of it,” Franklin said. “We’ve got to develop, we’ve got to recruit – we’ve got to get bigger. We’re undersized in some spots. Everybody thinks they’re Aaron Donald now, and they’re not. Like, everybody sees Aaron Donald playing undersized and everybody thinks they’re that guy. There’s one of those guys in the last 100 years of football. We need to be bigger, we need to be more physical. Our footwork, our techniques, our fundamentals. It’s all of it.”

PJ Mustipher, the Penn State defensive tackle that opposing teams do try to work away from, said of the big picture: “Just got to be physical, man. You can be whatever size you want to be. You’ve got to have that heart.”

Mustipher added that, in his opinion, the Nittany Lions had all that.

“I’ve got to really take a look at the film and see what was going on,” Mustipher said. “I don’t know what it was.”

Franklin had it right. All of it. This was indeed a statement game.