It was 3rd-and-5 from the Ohio State 30-yard line. Buckeyes quarterback Will Howard dropped back for his first pass attempt of the game. He looked for freshman wide receiver Jeremiah Smith to his right, but Penn State football cornerback Zion Tracy jumped the route, picked off Howard’s pass, and went untouched to the end zone.

Touchdown Penn State.

“That’s my brother right there,” safety Zakee Wheatley said after the game. “I’ve seen him since he came in as a freshman. The progress he’s made, you all are going to see him play a lot of football and a lot of plays.”

Just like that, the Nittany Lions were up 10-0 in the first quarter. The pick-six was reminiscent of Jaylen Reed’s touchdown a week ago against Wisconsin. That play changed the game for Penn State, and it looked like this pick-six was going to do the same.

All the momentum was on the home side of Beaver Stadium. It looked as though this was finally the year Penn State and James Franklin got over the Ohio State hump — something that hasn’t happened since 2016. The field was tilted and the game was in the Nittany Lions’ hands.

Until it wasn’t.

Howard made up for the mistake on the next drive with a 25-yard touchdown to Emeka Egbuka to cap off a seven-play, 74-yard drive that took just over three and a half minutes to achieve. The following drive ended with a 21-yard touchdown pass from Howard to Brandon Inniss. That drive took 10 plays to go 81 yards in three minutes and 42 seconds.

Tom Allen’s defense didn’t look like a top-four defense in terms of total yards allowed like it was ranked coming into the game. All of a sudden, Penn State was down 14-10. The energy of the record-breaking 111,030 crowd swiftly plummeted.

“Mistakes were made,” linebacker Kobe King said. “Guys have to be in the right spot, not pointing any figures, but mistakes were made and we didn’t execute the way we wanted to.”

But the scoreboard says the Nittany Lions’ defense was impressive. They held one of the best offenses in the country to just 20 points. But anyone who watched the game knows the score could’ve been much worse.

Howard missed some wide-open targets. He threw a pass to a wide-open Quinshon Judkins with a ball that was too high for the six-foot running back. Carnell Tate came down with a grab in the red zone, but Howard’s pass caused Tate to fall out of bounds. Finally, Smith was wide-open for a touchdown, but Howard overthrew his 6’3″, 215-pound receiver and the pass fell incomplete. This is not to mention when Wheatley punched the ball out of Howard’s hands as he fell into the end zone to force a touchback. If Wheatley hadn’t made that play, it would’ve been another touchdown.

But that was just Howard and the passing game. The ground game is a whole different story.

Nebraska held the Buckeyes to 64 rushing yards a week ago. Coming into the game, Penn State allowed 93 yards per game — which ranked No. 8 in the country. However, Ohio State had its way all game even without two of its left tackles.

Judkins led the way with 95 of Ohio State’s 178 rushing yards against Penn State. The 178 rushing yards were the second-most yards allowed on the ground this season.

“We’re going to look ourselves in the mirror and get better. That’s the best way we can do it,” linebacker Dom DeLuca said. “We didn’t execute, we had missed assignments, and critical errors. We’ve just got to come back tomorrow and get ready to get better.”

USC rushed for 189 yards against the Nittany Lions, but most of the yards came from a 75-yard rushing score in the first quarter. Ohio State’s ground game was different. The Buckeyes rushed 40 times, 16 more times than the Trojans, and the longest run of the afternoon was 22 yards.

It was a steady, consistent, and potent rushing attack that Penn State’s defense had no answers for. This was evident in the final drive of the game.

Drew Allar threw an incomplete pass on a 4th-and-goal from the one-yard line with 5:13 left in the game. The Buckeyes took over from there with their backs against the wall.

“You could get a safety and get the ball back, which puts you in a position to win the game,” James Franklin said on his decision to go for it on fourth down. “Get a two-point safety and the ball back with three timeouts.”

Instead, Ohio State took from its own one-yard line and eventually bled out the clock with a drive that consisted of 10 straight runs for 59 yards.

The runs went for the following amount of yards: four, nine, six, 15, six, two, three, seven, zero, seven.

“They had a championship drive right there, at the end,” Franklin said. “We did not play well in an obvious running situation. We did not handle, I think, the fact that the offense didn’t score in that situation well.”

“I had total confidence in them. I thought we were going to do it. It didn’t go our way,” King said of the fourth down stop. “After that, we used the next play mentally, had to get the defense right and get us on point to get the ball back to the offense. And there we didn’t execute where we wanted to.”

Luckily for Franklin and Penn State, all is not lost. There is still a legitimate opportunity to make the College Football Playoff, and if some big chips fall their way, maybe even the Big Ten Championship.

However, Ohio State exposed some serious flaws that need to be fixed before playing Washington in the White Out game next Saturday.

“You can try and flush as much as possible, but that’s how the game goes,” Wheatley said. “We’ve got to get things corrected so that moving forward, we don’t do what we did today that resulted in a loss.”