Penn State Football: 5 overreactions from win over Iowa
2. Is Penn State wasting Saquon Barkley’s tenure?
Saquon Barkley is by far the best player on Penn State’s roster, if not in the entire country.
His unique combination of size, speed and strength is absolutely unprecedented and his newfound success in the passing game and as a kick returner only cements his case as a true four-down back.
But is Penn State wasting arguably the program’s best player’s tenure in Happy Valley?
This season, Barkley has amassed 518 rushing yards in four games, good for roughly 130 yards per game, but he has accomplished this feat on only 66 attempts, or roughly 16.5 rushing attempts per game.
And if you remove Barkley’s 28 attempts for 211 yard performance in Week 4, things become even more questionable.
Over the first three weeks of the season, Barkley recorded 311 rushing yards on only 38 carries. Until Week 4, the team’s all-world tailback didn’t have a single game in 2017 with over 14 rushing attempts.
Just think about that, other star college running backs, like Leonard Fornette from the 2016 LSU Tigers, would sometimes rush 38 times a game, and Barkley, arguably a more complete back, totaled that many carries over three games.
Penn State’s offense is predicated on the big play, and it’s abundantly clear that offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead is infatuated with the deep ball, but it’s wonder-some why the team doesn’t run its offense through the best player, instead of using his as a supplemental player, or a decoy in read-option plays.
Related Story: Penn State Football: Comparing Saquon Barkley to recent 1st-round RBs
In four weeks, Trace McSorley, the team’s 6-foot, sub-200 pound quarterback, has only 26 less rushing attempts than Barkley for the season, with 40, and while some of these runs came off of broken coverage, the team still seems too ambivalent to running their offense through their best player.
Barkley reminds me a lot of current Pittsburg Steelers’ back Le’veon Bell, he’s got that same inside outside running style that is so hard to contain, and could become just as deadly in the passing game as he continues to develop as a player.
In Week 4, Barkley put his team on his back and lead the Nittany Lions in both rushing and receiving yards on 40 total offensive touches. In the coming weeks, the team should try to replicate this trend.