Steely McSorley leads Lions again

If ever there were a time for the nerves to hit Penn State quarterback Trace McSorley, this situation, you’d think, would be an awfully good candidate:

One minute, six seconds on the clock. Fourth-and-2. Down seven points to Appalachian State, which was on the verge of upsetting yet another Top 10 team. An offense with first-time starters at two key positions, running back and slot receiver, that had struggled for chunks of the game, including the previous two series, on which it went three-and-out as the Mountaineers mounted their comeback.

And no Saquon Barkley, of course.

But after Penn State’s 45-38 overtime victory, when McSorley was asked whether he got nervous, he looked at the questioner as if that concept didn’t make a lot of sense. “Not really,” he said.

And it was not, he said, because of his own experience and his previous successes, which have made him a leading Heisman Trophy candidate. It was, he said, because the Nittany Lions were prepared for anything.

“Coach Franklin says you can sleep like a baby Friday knowing you have done everything and you’re not nervous,” said McSorley, who completed 21 of 36 passes for 230 yards and one touchdown and rushed the ball 12 times for 53 yards and two touchdowns.

What that specifically means, he said, goes beyond knowing what you’re supposed to do on each play. You’ve also, he said, got to know what the “fail-safe” is—what to do if something doesn’t go as planned.

And the fourth-and-2 play proved his point. McSorley connected with Brandon Polk for a 10-yard completion on a play that was not the one Penn State had originally called, setting up, three plays later, a touchdown that sent the game into overtime.

“We were trying to attack a defense they had been showing us,” McSorley said. “They did a really good job of disguising that defense, getting us into that play call and then dropping out of that play call and running something completely different.”

This time, Penn State was ready. And on this play, Polk was that fail-safe.

“Brandon did a great job,” McSorley said. “I was able to get the ball to him, and he was able to turn up even a couple more yards and get out of bounds.”

But the success, of course, wasn’t all due to the supporting cast. On that touchdown drive, McSorley completed 5 of 6 passes, including the fourth-down pass, a 14-yarder to Juwan Johnson and a 15-yard touchdown pass to K.J. Hamler. (That pass, by the way, with 42 seconds to play, extended McSorley’s streak of games with a touchdown pass to 29 games.)

“Obviously when you’ve got Trace McSorley as your quarterback with the game on the line,” Coach James Franklin said, “that always helps.”

But for a while, particularly in the first half, it didn’t look as if having McSorley were enough. The offense struggled early, with receivers dropping passes and the offensive line not giving McSorley enough time to throw. McSorley scored the game’s first touchdown on a 12-yard run in the first quarter, but that was about all the offense the Nittany Lions could muster.

The key, McSorley said, was to not panic—another concept that he said the coaches, particularly new offensive coordinator Ricky Rahne, stress in practice.

“Coach Rahne always says, ‘Don’t make a play, make the play,’” McSorley said. “You don’t need to do anything extraordinary. You don’t need to do anything outside of what each play call asks you to do.”

And with the game on the line, McSorley said, that’s exactly what he and Polk did.

“I think that’s a perfect example of making the play,” he said. “And it ends up working out for us.”