Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/587739
O c T O B E R 1 8 , 2 0 1 5 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . c O m 13 Why was Christian Hackenberg in at the end of hte game and did you consider taking him out? He got banged up. I asked the doctors if he was good to go, they said he was good to go, so we're going to continue. ... It's no different than late in the game they had Bosa and their starting defense in there. We're still playing football to win, to try to find a way to be success- ful. What did you think of Saquon Barkley's performance? I was hopeful that he was going to be able to play last week. Obviously he played well this week. We want to con- tinue building on that. One of the things that was challenging was, he's running the ball and we're moving the ball and having some success and we have a negative-yardage play. Now you're in a long-yardage situation, an obvious passing situation, which is everything you want to stay out of with where we're at right now, especially being on the road. We had the issues with the crowd noise and then the snap got snapped at the wrong time and hits Brandon [Polk] on the fake sweep. Those things all contributed to long- yardage situations. What was the impact of Ohio State pinning you deep? I think that's significant, the fact that their punter was able to be really ag- gressive and get the ball off. Not only was he able to swing field position a few times, but he was also able to sky punt us and back us down there deep a bunch of times. The ball I think one time rolled down to the 2- or 3-yard line, and nu- merous times we caught the ball at the 6. And then we go to punt it and punt it for – what was the average? It wasn't very good. So that field position kept catching up with us. What happened on fourth-and-2 sack? Barkley was the fourth progression on the back side. We went for the flat to a stick route. Again, we had options, we thought we had a chance at the stick route. It didn't happen. They kept get- ting push and getting pressure. For Christian, to think we're going to get back to the fourth progression on a three-step drop is probably not going to happen. Do you have to say anything to Mike Gesicki? He's got a chance to be a really good player. We believe in him. He's got an opportunity to make plays that he will make. We're going to keep going to him and keep giving him opportunities. He's made those plays in practice and he's made those in games. But he needs to do it consistently, no different than any other guy. COACHSPEAK | E X c E R P T S F R O m J A m E S F R A N K L I N ' S P O S T G A m E P R E S S E R PULLING AWAY After missing Penn State's previous two games, Barkley returned to action against Ohio State and had a big night for the Nittany Lions, rushing with 194 yards on 26 carries. Photo by Steve Manuel