Drew Allar looked different in Saturday’s 34-12 win at West Virginia, and every Penn State fan should have noticed it.
Not only did he play perhaps his best game at PSU— 11-for-17, 216 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions— he also showed a type of fire that PSU fans felt he lacked in 2023.
Whether it was screaming at an official after a fumble because he felt West Virginia clapped its snap cadence or the emotion he showed after a ferocious stiff-arm, Allar showed something many felt he hadn’t shown in his first season as starter in 2023.
WVU recovers the fumble and Drew Allar is UPSET at the officials! #CountryRoads
pic.twitter.com/uTTDcEAuvl— Play The Fight Song (@PlayTheFightPod) August 31, 2024
Drew Allar just DOMINATED WVU
WHAT A STIFF ARM pic.twitter.com/YAsKvsi9Nq
— Barstool Penn State (@PSUBarstool) August 31, 2024
“I seen something that I’d never seen out of him before,” safety KJ Winston said after the game, via Daniel Gallen of Lions247. “He’s out there talking his stuff, talking his smack and everything, and he’s just having his groove out there. And I love to see it from Drew.”
It seems like yesterday when Allar, a former five-star from Medina, Ohio, was Penn State’s most-anticipated QB recruit since Christian Hackenberg more than a decade prior.
Now, he’s in his third season with the program. Coach James Franklin feels he should be better version of what he was.
But he also feels that self-assurance is something that shouldn’t just be handed out.
“He shouldn’t look the same,” Franklin said at his weekly presser Monday, “shouldn’t behave the same. There should be growth. There should be more confidence, more swagger. Because he’s earned that, right? Confidence is something you earn. It’s not something that you give, it’s something you’ve earned.”
As for Allar’s stiff arm, Franklin feels the location where it happened made it even more rewarding.
“That stiff arm was a credit to our strength and conditioning program,” he said, “and also a credit to Drew and the work he’s put in. And I also think for that to happen on our sideline and for our sideline to see that and see him make a play like that that he has not made in the past, and to react the way he reacted, was really pretty cool.”
Franklin has big hopes for Drew Allar but this new surge of swagger is something that he’s not even sure he had anticipated.
“I don’t know if I necessarily would’ve said that I knew that was coming,” he said, “but I sure was glad it happened.”
