Former Penn State OC recounts Big Ten title game-winning play

Close your eyes for a moment and reflect on the 2016 season and the Penn State football team is in the Big Ten Championship game against Wisconsin. The game looked ugly at first, Wisconsin grabbed a huge lead and it didn’t look great for the Nittany Lions. But suddenly they started chipping away at the lead and before you know it the momentum has shifted back to Penn State’s side. Now, what if I told you that the play that won Penn State the Big Ten Championship Game was a play that the Nittany Lions never ran before because it was a miscalled play?

Former Penn State OC recounts Big Ten title game-winning play

Recently, Grace Raynor and Chris Kamrani who cover College Football for The Athletic wrote a piece Tales from the coaches’ headset: ‘It’s total chaos.‘ Within that piece, Raynor has a wonderful section from former Penn State offensive coordinator Ricky Rahne who speaks about one of the most famous plays in Penn State history from the 2016 Big Ten Championship Game.

Rahne said “Coach (Joe) Moorhead, who did an awesome job in that game, he calls a play that – he miscalls a play. We literally never ran a play that we’ve never run – in practice, in anything. We’d never run it. We had no idea. But we had a pretty good system and we had obviously great players and (Trace) McSorley just kind of drops back and throws a touchdown – throws the game-winning touchdown pass to Saquon (Barkley) on a play that was miscalled and we were all panicking.”

It’s almost unbelievable that a play that looked so natural was something that the team never run before or even practiced. Instead, those days of playing football in the backyard took over. It shows just how in sync McSorley and Barkley were during their time at Penn State. But now we know that one of the more recognizable plays in Penn State history was truly a mistake.

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