In front of the largest crowd in Beaver Stadium history, Penn State quarterback Trace McSorley did it all, throwing, particularly running, compiling a school record 461 yards, but he didn't get the ball in the biggest play of the game. The Penn State defense, after playing so well, wilted the final eight minutes. For the second year in a row, it's the Buckeyes by a point, 27-26.
"We are not an elite football team yet," Penn State head coach James Franklin said. "As hard as we have worked to go from average to good, and from good to great - the work that it's going to take to get to an elite program, it's going to be just as hard as the ground and the distance that we have already traveled, it's going to be just as hard to get there. Scratch and claw and fight. Right now, we are comfortable being great. I am going to make sure that everyone in our program, including myself, is very uncomfortable because you only grow in life when you are uncomfortable."
"We're going to take the good things we did, look at the bad things we did, all the mistakes because at the end of the day, even when we did great plays, there's still some more plays we could have done better in, and that's what i mean by the details," senior linebacker Koa Farmer said. "We're going to look at every play, good, bad or neutral and we have to find things that we can get better at."
"You lose by one point and in everyone's mind, it immediately goes 'what could i have done better to make up that one point?'" senior quarterback Trace McSorley said. "When everyone came in, it's a situation where we had it. We had an opportunity to win the game and just weren't able to come through and I think that's the biggest thing, just people are just hurting right now over that stuff, but it's something that's going to hurt for the next 24, 36, 48 hours, whatever it might be, but we're going to have to come back and just learn from this, be extremely critical of ourselves and get better."