Week Eight Game Day Primer: Indiana vs. Penn State
/
Written by T.J. Inman
Week Eight Primer – Penn State Nittany Lions
What: Indiana Hoosiers (4-3) vs. Penn State Nittany Lions (4-2)
Where: Memorial Stadium
When: Saturday, October 20, 3:30
How to Watch: The game will be broadcast on ABC. You can also listen to the legendary Don Fischer on the radio on any IU Radio Network station.
What’s at Stake: The Indiana Hoosiers have lost back-to-back games and a loss against Penn State drops them to .500 on the season, heading into a Friday night game at Minnesota. A win would erase the bad taste from last Saturday’s discouraging defeat to Iowa and would go a long way towards erasing the memories of that all-around awful performance. A victory would also leave the Hoosiers just one victory short of bowl eligibility. Penn State comes into this contest as losers of two straight after they surprisingly fell to Michigan State in Happy Valley last Saturday. Their hopes of winning the Big Ten East are gone and they must rally to secure themselves a shot at a nice bowl game and keep the momentum their program has built.
Gameday Bingo Presented by Vintage Brand
GAME RULES
Print the bingo card, pick from any three below
Any horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines win!
First five winners will get entries into a raffle for a vintage IU Football canvas
After the game screen shot or send your winning bingo ticket to @Hoosier_Huddle on twitter or theHoosierHuddle@gmail.com
Vintage Brand is an online retailer specializing in authentic sports art for the modern fan. We have a collection of over 10,000 sporting tickets, programs and schedules that have been digitally produced and rendered on a number of every day products.
Our goal is to help Hoosier fans relive their favorite sports memories while highlighting some of the great artwork and photography distributed over the decades. Cards will be released on Twitter prior to game time.
Things to Watch
1. How Will the Hoosiers Respond?
Of all the things to watch this Saturday, perhaps none is of more interest to me than how the Indiana Hoosiers will respond to the whooping given to them by Iowa on Homecoming. Indiana was bad on offense, defense and special teams and I don’t think the playcalling set the players up for success on offense. To paraphrase The Lego Movie, everything was NOT awesome. IU had a players led meeting this week and that could be interpreted one of two ways. You could say the team is on the brink of falling apart and the season caving in or you could say the players are taking ownership of the performance and the meeting will be a rallying point that will see improved play moving forward. The beginnings of this answer will show on Saturday.
2. “Be Aggressive…Be-e Aggressive!”
I don’t know if my brain (getting more forgetful by the day!) is misremembering this or if this cheerleader-led chant actually used to exist. In my mind, high school cheerleaders would chant “be aggressive, be-e aggressive!” repeatedly and I hope that has somehow wormed its way into offensive coordinator Mike DeBord’s brain. The offense was reasonably aggressive at Ohio State and it was very encouraging to see the Hoosiers take shots down the field and get the ball into Nick Westbrook’s hands and run a couple of creative plays to get wide open looks for players. Last week, things regressed to a mostly short and intermediate passing game and very little aggressiveness on either side of the ball. I will put this bluntly, in my opinion, the Indiana Hoosiers cannot win six games this season if they play conservatively and uncreatively on offense.
3. Keeping the PSU Offense In a Funk
Penn State’s offense was a bit of a question mark entering the season as they lost Saquon Barkley and innovative offensive mind Joe Moorhead. However, things looked great after surviving Appalachian State in the opener. They demolished a few opponents and ran the ball at will on a Friday night at Illinois. The attack was more or less rolling along at halftime against Ohio State as the Nittany Lions cruised to a nice lead over the Buckeyes. Then things began to fall apart. They barely moved the ball in the second half and fell by a point. The Nittany Lions offense looked absolutely awful against Michigan State last week, passing for only 192 yards, going just 3-14 on third downs and only breaking loose on a pair of long runs to keep things close against the Spartans. IU’s defense is capable of playing well but they’ll need to perform much better than they did against the Hawkeyes or Trace McSorley will carve them up.
What the Sharps are Saying
The Hoosiers are 14.5-point underdogs on Saturday when the Nittany Lions come to town. IU has not been very good ATS in 2018 going 2-5. ESPN’s FPI metric also gives Penn State a 90.3-percent chance of a victory.