Why Penn State is putting Drew Allar's development in the hands of a grad assistant (2024)

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Danny O’Brien took a few minutes to wrap his head around the idea of going back to school in his 30s.

Shortly after the quarterback’s playing career ended in the Canadian Football League, he arrived at Penn State as an analyst in March 2021. The former Maryland and Wisconsin quarterback had his sights set on one day becoming an offensive coordinator or a head coach.

This offseason, the 33-year-old took another step toward the goal by joining a small club of college football position coaches who are also graduate assistants. O’Brien, who became a graduate assistant ahead of the 2023 season, now also has arguably the most important position coaching job on the staff. He was named Penn State’s quarterbacks coach in February after months of title changes, putting him in charge of the day-to-day development of former five-star recruit Drew Allar, who is entering his second year as the starter after an uneven sophom*ore campaign, aiming for a 2024 breakthrough.

O’Brien went from analyst to graduate assistant and then to interim quarterbacks coach. Now, the interim descriptor is gone — all while he’s still a graduate student needing to find time late at night to write papers as he works toward a master’s degree in educational leadership.

“This business is so crazy that it’s more just do your job and be ready,” O’Brien said. “For this being the way to have my own room for the first time, I wouldn’t say I foresaw it, but I’m just appreciative and grateful to have the opportunity to run a room, let alone with the quarterbacks and to have the trust of (James) Franklin, the quarterbacks and the staff to do that.”

With great effort and leadership to close out winter workouts, the final competitor of the day this morning goes to @AllarDrew! #IronSharpensIron 🎯 pic.twitter.com/R0VEIigJbw

— Danny O'Brien (@DannyOBrienQB) March 1, 2024

O’Brien is not one of Penn State’s 10 full-time assistant coaches. His role is a creative wrinkle that some coaches have tapped into over the years. Sometimes staffs designate a graduate assistant to be in charge of coordinating the special teams. Ed Orgeron did it by having graduate assistants coach his outside linebackers and tight ends at LSU. Before the NCAA made way for a 10th assistant coach in 2018, it was more common to see the kind of setup that Penn State now has with O’Brien.

Last spring, Penn State elevated Deion Barnes to defensive line coach after he worked alongside John Scott Jr. as a GA. O’Brien’s path to position coach has been accelerated.

Is it a way to stash a future coach? Potentially, but not every aspiring coach will be ready or willing to take on both roles. Penn State hired a new offensive coordinator (Andy Kotelnicki), defensive coordinator (Tom Allen) and special teams coordinator (Justin Lustig) in the past four months. In an offseason full of change, O’Brien will be spending the most time with the quarterbacks, even as Kotelnicki — who does not have a position coach title — and Franklin still pop in and out of the meeting room.

“The biggest difference now is just running the room on a day-to-day basis by myself,” O’Brien said. “It’s something that I’ve been working hard to be ready for whenever that time came. It’s been really fun and a really good challenge. Having a bigger voice in the staff room and being able to voice things from a quarterback’s perspective has been really fun. Coach K is so great at letting everyone share ideas and getting to the best thing collectively. I’ve learned a ton.”

Franklin, who was O’Brien’s first offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Maryland, wouldn’t have elevated O’Brien to this role if he didn’t believe he had the right guy waiting in the wings. Franklin has long called his pupil a “rising star” in the coaching profession. When O’Brien moved to State College, he lived above Franklin’s garage for a time. He’s known Franklin and his family since he was 16.

“We worked so late that I didn’t really see him all that much,” O’Brien said. “It was like I’d go into my side, he’d pull into his side and the next day we’d go to work. But the times we were able to kind of hang out a little bit and catch up, particularly in my first year transitioning into coaching, it was invaluable to me.”

Graduate assistants are allowed to be hands-on coaches on the field, something analysts can’t do. Last summer, Franklin and O’Brien agreed that moving him into a graduate assistant role was in his best interest. Franklin said it would allow them to “take the restraints off” of O’Brien. At first, they weren’t sure if O’Brien could transition from analyst to graduate assistant. It’s not often that a coach goes this route.

But O’Brien and Franklin trusted that getting him hands-on coaching experience was what needed to happened next

“Danny understands how we do things, our culture, how I’m wired and how we think,” Franklin said last summer.

Last season, offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich called plays from the booth. O’Brien was the one communicating with the quarterbacks on the sideline. O’Brien was also able to work with them at practice alongside Yurcich, who had the quarterbacks coach title. After Penn State fired Yurcich in November, O’Brien stepped up in a bit of a trial run as interim quarterbacks coach. It spoke volumes when Franklin said one of Drew Allar’s first questions after Yurcich’s firing was if O’Brien would still be involved with the quarterbacks.

“He’s meant a ton (to me),” Allar said in December. “He brings a lot of value to our quarterback room because he’s played it in college and in the CFL. He has a lot of experience. Since he’s on the younger side of coaching, he’s able to relate to us real easily and he knows how we feel as quarterbacks. I think we all see the game the same way.”

Of course, there are parameters in place that make O’Brien’s job different than that of one of the 10 assistants. Besides the classes he’s largely completing online, he will not be on the road recruiting, though he jokes that he’s available out of the bullpen as the “tap-in recruiter.”

When Yurcich was fired, O’Brien was elevated to the 10th assistant coach role, which meant he could temporarily be on the road recruiting. When Manny Diaz left in December to become Duke’s head coach, O’Brien was again allowed back out on the road.

O’Brien relished those opportunities, even as he saw first-hand just how grueling the logistics are as he’d check in with quarterbacks from coast to coast. The first player he visited on a recruiting trip was four-star quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer, who signed with Penn State in December.

At the time, Grunkemeyer said O’Brien told him as much as he could about Kotelnicki’s offense. This spring, as O’Brien works with his quarterbacks to make sure they all understand the verbiage and concepts of the new offense, he’s quizzed them and put them up at the board.

“It’s just challenging them in as many different ways whether that’s visually or walking through it or saying it, drawing it,” O’Brien said. “If it’s a concept that we had last year it’s having Drew or Beau (Pribula) or Jaxon (Smolik) teach Grunk. There’s many different ways, we’re just battling time. Spring is gonna be great for that, but it’s been rewarding so far.”

It may technically be his quarterback room for the first time, but there hasn’t been a huge adjustment in understanding the personalities and skills of his quarterbacks. The quarterbacks also haven’t had to adjust to him.

O’Brien has had a hand in recruiting every quarterback on Penn State’s roster despite not being allowed on the road most of the time. Throughout players’ recruitments, they’ve often raved about meeting with O’Brien on campus. A graduate assistant garnering that kind of praise made it clear that O’Brien’s coaching career was on an upward trajectory, even if he’s now in this somewhat unorthodox hybrid role.

“This is a hard place for me to leave, just with the relationships in that room, mine with coach Franklin and it’s Penn State,” O’Brien said. “The GA thing is the way we’ve gotten it done.

“Honestly, the hardest adjustment has just been taking classes at 33 (laughs). It’s been fun too getting back to that stuff and putting things in APA format late at night.”

(Top photo: Joe Robbins / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)