Iowa defenders as they converged on the
ball. Johnson caught the 7-yard touch-
down pass to give the Lions a walk-o=
21-19 victory.
BEST
RUN
A few years ago, someone
put together a montage of Barkley's top
10 plays at Penn State and posted it on
YouTube. You could pretty much pick
any one of those carries at random and
include it here. They're all spectacular.
For the sake of brevity, let's go with his
79-yard touchdown run to open the sec-
ond half of the 2017 Rose Bowl against
USC. That play showcased so much of
what made him great at Penn State: the
vision, the instant acceleration and the
blazing speed that opponents couldn't
match in the open er he entered
the NFL and showed o= his new ink on
Twitter.
That didn't sit well with Stribling, who
tweeted that "some people just ain't
built for the league." Robinson, who
showed during his er
evading a tackle inside his own 10, he
found a lane and stayed in
bounds until reaching the App
State 48. Seven plays later, he
scored on a 15-yard pass recep-
tion from McSorley, and the Lions sent
the game to overtime, eventually win-
ning, 45-38.
Hamler said his moment of indecision
came when he couldn't tell whether
teammate Johnathan Thomas was urg-
ing him to bring the ball out or call for a
touchback. "He didn't give me any sig-
nal," Hamler said. "So I said, all right,
go. I just went, and luckily it put us into
good ime,
so there was still a lot of football to be
played at that point in the game. If you
prefer a high-pressure late-game kick,
how about the 44-yarder that Ficken hit
in the waning seconds of the Pinstripe
Bowl to send the game to overtime? Or
maybe the 36-yarder that Ficken hit on
the ime. "We
knew we had to come out ime, it's
now or never. We always talk about how
good we can be, and it was time to stop
talking and start doing it."
The Nittany Lions went three-and-
out on their first possession of the
third quarter, and it didn't look as
though they were going to fare any bet-
ter on their second possession. But on
third-and-10 from Penn State's 20-
yard line, McSorley found Irvin Charles
over the middle, and the lanky receiver
shook off a defender and ran for a
touchdown to cut Minnesota's lead to
13-10. The two teams traded punches
the rest of the way, with Barkley deliv-
ering the knockout blow in overtime on
a 25-yard TD run that gave the Lions a
29-26 win.
Players will tell you they always had
faith that their new Joe Moorhead-de-
signed o=ense was going to work and
that they were going to be able to turn
around a season that had begun with
two losses in their > C O T T O N B O W L P R E V I E W
