Micah Shrewsberry compliments Penn State's defense against Michigan

Penn State head coach Micha Shrewsberry and his squad had a historic win over Michigan on Sunday, defeating them 83-61 in their largest margin win over the Wolverines in program history. The Nittany Lions’ impressive defensive performance was the star of the show, which Shewsberry gave some credit to assistant coach Mike Farrelly to following their win.

“I thought coach Farrelly did a great job of preparing this, getting us ready for what they want to do, how they wanted to run the different actions that they did to get Hunter (Dickinson) the ball. People have just been force-feeding the ball in the paint to us, there comes a time where you got to take a stand and you got to do something different so I thought we needed to be a little more aggressive today,” Shrewsberry explained.

The Nittany Lions crashed the boards, winning the rebounding battle, and had active hands on defense with seven steals on the night. But their ability to limit the Wolverines from scoring was their highlight of the night keeping all but one Michigan player, Jett Howard, from scoring in double figures despite three averaging 10-plus points per game.

“Like I said we could’ve done a better job on Jett, but he’s a good player man,” Shrewsberry admitted. “He makes tough shots, he’s got size so he can shoot over the top of you. But we didn’t let everybody else get going, I think that was the key, so as long as we held him in check.”

Howard bounced back from the first 0-point game of his freshman campaign versus Minnesota with a 21-point performance against the Nittany Lions. It was his third 20-plus-point outing of the season, as he’s proven week in and week out to be one of the hardest scoring wings in the Big Ten to stop.

Penn State may not have been able to stop Howard, but they did slow down Michigan’s leading scorer and the conference’s fourth-leading scorer in center Hunter Dickinson. Dickinson has averaged 17.7 points per game this season but was held to a season-low 6 points on Sunday.

“Hunter Dickinson’s a really good player, he’s such a great passer that when you double him it’s a little bit scary because he can find people. But I thought the guys that weren’t involved in the double really were flying around and playing with second efforts,” Shrewsberry said.

The Nittany Lions will definitely want to bring that same defensive effort and production in their next matchup, as they face No. 1 ranked Purdue on the road Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET.