MORGANTOWN — Nobody seems to quite know what Penn State’s offense is going to look like this season, just that the Nittany Lions have the potential to be very good.
New offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki has a strong track record of success, spending the last three seasons at Kansas and the previous five at Buffalo.
“Andy did a great job at Kansas and before that, he did a great job at Buffalo,” WVU head coach Neal Brown said Monday. “He got after us pretty good last time he was here with Kansas.”
The Mountaineers last faced Kotelnicki in 2022, when the Jayhawks put up 511 yards in a 55-42 win in Morgantown. He’ll be back in Morgantown when the Mountaineers and Nittany Lions kick off the 2024 season at Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday (noon, FOX).
Kotelnicki moved over to Penn State this offseason, replacing Mike Yurcich, who was fired last November.
The Nittany Lions have plenty of firepower, led by running backs Kaytron Allen (902 rushing yards in 2023) and Nicholas Singleton (1,060 total yards). The difference is in the quarterback, where junior Drew Allar is much different from Kansas’s Jalon Daniels and Jason Bean.
“We always start from a personnel standpoint,” Brown said. “You evaluate the personnel, the guys you think you’re going to see. You look at the strengths and weaknesses of those players and then you evaluate the schemes you could potentially see.”
At 6-5 and 235 pounds, Allar is bigger than Daniels (6-0, 220) and Bean (6-3, 205) and a more traditional pocket passer.
To prepare for Penn State, Brown said the Mountaineers cannot simply look at what Kotelnicki did at Kansas and expect to see the same things.
“There’s a lot to review,” Brown said. “You’re watching Kansas film, you’re watching what Penn State did last year to get the strengths of their football team.”
“It’ll be interesting to see how much there’s carryover from Kansas to Penn State,” WVU defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley added. “The personnel is quite a bit different than how he used the personnel at Kansas…You look at a little bit of everything. I think the best thing he does is he does what his personnel can do.”
Allar threw for 2,631 yards with a 59.9 completion percentage with 25 touchdowns and just two interceptions last season. He had 325 yards and three touchdowns in a 38-15 win over West Virginia.
To get an idea of how Kotelnicki might use Allar, Brown and Lesley actually went further back than Kotelnicki’s time at Kansas, back to 2018 at Buffalo.
“I think you have to dig a little deeper,” Brown explained. “If you look at what Andy did at Buffalo, they had a quarterback that’s very similar in size and had a big strong arm like Drew does. You look back to what he did there.”
That quarterback, Tyree Jackson, was even bigger than Allar, listed at 6-7, 245. In 2018, Brown and Lesley, then coaching at Troy, faced Kotelnicki and Jackson in the Dollar General Bowl. Troy won 42-32 with Jackson throwing for 274 with a touchdown and interception. The Bulls had 376 total yards as a team.
However, no matter how hard they study, the Mountaineers won’t know exactly what Kotelnicki’s gameplan is until the ball kicks off on Saturday.
“It’s just a best guess,” Brown said. “They don’t know what we’re going to run and all of our coordinators are back. We don’t know what they’re going to run and they’re all three new.
“My educated guess is that we’re going to see some remnants of what they used to do…and then some new ideas that all three coordinators bring with them from their previous stops.”
Lesley said he’ll feel Kotelnicki’s offense out during the beginning of the game to learn what is going to work best for WVU’s defense.
“It’ll be kind of a vanilla approach (on defense) to see early in the game what it is,” Lesley said. “I assume it’ll be the same type of structure (as Kansas), a lot of moving pieces and a lot of eye candy.”
Penn State and West Virginia will kick off for the first time in Morgantown since 1992 on Saturday. The game is scheduled to start at noon and will be broadcast on FOX. FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame show will broadcast live between the light blue and teal parking lots beginning at 10 a.m.
WVU announced Tuesday afternoon that tickets to the game have sold out.
