Defensive Film Review: Penn State gets pressure without getting pressure

The Penn State defense allowed 24 offensive points to Purdue on Thursday night in a 35-31 victory. There are hundreds of interesting nuggets to unearth in the performance, from individual player performance to defensive scheme and execution. We'll touch on several of those in today's film review and try to understand how the Nittany Lions performed in a game where they tallied ten pass breakups but tied for 12th in the Big Ten with 17 missed tackles on the night.  Like head coach James Franklin does at the start of every post-game press conference, we'll start by tipping our hat to the Purdue offense and the game plan they put together to face Penn State. They had several great play designs ready for Diaz's defense, and quarterback Aidan O'Connell executed them well. So we'll start with discussing Purdue and their quick-game attack on offense.  Truthfully, quick-game might be a misnomer for what O'Connell and play-caller Jeff Brohm executed on Thursday night. There was plenty of RPO featuring slants, some screens, and other passes into the flat, sure. But typically, quick-game passing attempts don't travel more than five yards downfield.