[Upchurch]

You’ve been around a while. Have you seen a more diverse offense than that in your experience that gave you more challenges and little quirks and had to worry about more aspects of it?

“Yeah, thought their offense played extremely well. Understatement. They were hitting on all cylinders. The back is really good, as advertised, and the quarterback, McSorley, played extremely well. Yeah, they were hitting on all cylinders. Quarterback was hot and receivers made plays downfield and it was impressive.”

The way Penn State jumped out like that, did they hit you guys with some things—the Barkley direct snap, stuff like that where they popped you—that you guys didn’t expect?

“Yeah, I mean, they hit us on quite a few plays that we’ve defensed well this year and I thought their execution was really good tonight right from the beginning. Then we got it a little bit under control and then they came back and hit the quarterback sucker play, hit the inside fade, downfield balls, really good throws, well played by the receivers, et cetera. As I said, it was a good performance.”

After the first five minutes it was like an avalanche but your team was able to answer and get one point away from them and then it went away from them. Explain how you saw the flow of the game and why that was.

“Eh, it’s just—the flow of the game, I think everybody saw the flow of the game. Thought they were really executing well and we had our difficulties scoring, moving the ball, and getting them stopped.”

Fans will want to extrapolate more than just this game to the importance of this game but I’m assuming you don’t buy into that for recruiting and all the other reasons but I don’t know. Does a game like this have impact more than one game or is it just a game?

“I don’t know either. We’re going to regroup, we’re gonna refit, retool, and get back to work. More opportunities ahead of us.”

Seven sacks Penn State had defensively. Did they do anything systematically to surprise you?

“No. They did a nice job on the edge. They beat us on the edge multiple times.”

With two losses in the Big Ten it certainly seems to be problematic whether or not you can—what do you lean on going forward because the defense has been something you’ve leaned on and it got picked apart by a good team today, the offense still seems to be—what do you lean on with your team going forward? What do you hope is the strength of this team going forward?

“We endure and be better. We’re gonna regroup and come back.”

John said something about how after the game they got told there’s no more bandwagon, fake love’s gone, it’s just on you guys now. What does that mean when you say something like that? How do you solve this, I suppose?

“I mean, they’re our team. We solve it with our team. Nobody else can help us but us. We put our best people on it, our players and our coaches.”

Can it be solvable this season? You’re seven games into the season; can it be solvable this season?

“Yes.”