UNIVERSITY PARK — Last year at this time, Penn State football was learning a new offense under a new offensive coordinator with limited time to prepare for the season.

Then, the Big Ten canceled the 2020 season just a few weeks before its scheduled start.

Fast forward two months, and the team again was preparing for the season, albeit a shortened one, with even less time to prepare.

Now, just under eight months after that abbreviated season ended, the Nittany Lions are again learning a new offense. This time, however, they’re much further along than they were in 2020 and will have a chance to drastically improve on that side of the field under new offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich.

The team sputtered under Kirk Ciarrocca in 2020 and didn’t have a chance to gain traction, rendering it rather easy to be ahead of where it was at this time last year.

Of course, being ahead doesn’t mean the team is in perfect position to show up and put up 40-plus points in the season opener like it frequently did under former offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead. That’s hard enough to do in general, but it’s even harder against a Big Ten opponent like Wisconsin in Week 1.

“We got a really, really huge challenge Week 1 against Wisconsin (with) how good they’re coached on defense, how talented they are on defense,” Yurcich said. “At their place? That’s a challenge in itself. However explosive we have to be to win that game is what we want to be. Whatever that entails. That’s the goal.”

Even if the opponent wasn’t a team as good as the Badgers, Penn State still might not have been ready to explode in its season opener.

Transitioning to a new offense takes time and hard work, and while the Nittany Lions have had plenty of time to put both in, that doesn’t guarantee success. The team must go out and execute what it has been learning and working on since Yurcich was hired in January. Even the new offensive coordinator doesn’t know how obvious that work will be against Wisconsin.

“If I knew exactly how long it’s gonna take (for the offense to excel), I’d probably go into the fortune-telling business,” Yurcich said. “I can’t predict. All we can do is plan, look at where we are from a personnel standpoint. … All we have to do is go to work, play to our personnel strengths, figure out who our best players are, compete, make sure that our best players are getting pushed, create great depth, understand our philosophy (and) just put our best foot forward every day.

“When will we explode? When will we have great production? That will come with time. We don’t have to try to look into the future and predict that. That’s not very productive time well spent.”

The timeline might be unknown, but that doesn’t mean things will go south as quickly as they did last year when the team started 0-5 and struggled to move the ball and finish drives. The transition from the offense Moorhead installed in 2016, and what Ricky Rahne ran after Moorhead’s departure, to the offense Ciarrocca ran was far from smooth.

The team became more power run-heavy last season and didn’t jell with the scheme set forth by Ciarrocca.

Those struggles were apparent, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Penn State coach James Franklin sees the team pivoting to an offense more similar to the one that carried the Nittany Lions to New Year’s Six bowls in the 2016, ’17 and ’19 seasons.

“ … Going back to Joe Moorhead, I think it’s similar to that,” Franklin said at Penn State media day. “I think if you look, even when we first got here from Vanderbilt, we had a lot of spread concepts. Then we kind of took it to a whole other level with Joe. You know, we’re back to that. That’s really kind of who we wanted to be the entire time that we’ve been here.”

Of course, it’s easy to say the team is pivoting to that highly successful offense. Those groups also possessed the most dynamic offensive player in Penn State history in 2016 and ’17 in Saquon Barkley and a litany of high-flying options in 2019.

Yet the opportunity will be there for success in 2021. Yurcich enters with the track record of one of the best coordinators in college football, routinely engineering high-powered offenses at every stop since he made his Division I coordinating debut in 2013. He has one of the best weapons in the country in senior wide receiver Jahan Dotson, along with five running backs who could see the field and two dynamic tight ends.

Most of those weapons were available last year, too, but the team couldn’t take advantage. Fortunately for the Nittany Lions, the timeline to get ready for the season has expanded this year, and, according to Franklin, they’ve taken full advantage.

“It’s hard to compare anything to how it was last season,” he said. “I don’t think that’s necessarily fair to some of the coaches that were put in that situation last year.

“But I love where we’re at. We’re way ahead.”

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