There’s no sugarcoating how bad Penn State’s blowout defeat at New Ryan Field was on Friday night against Northwestern.

In the debut of a new state-of-the-art stadium on national television, the Wildcats’ run game looked like a hot knife through butter, gashing the Nittany Lions for a staggering 413 rushing yards on 55 carries.

It’s usually a bad thing to allow 5 yards per carry, so allowing 7.5 yards per carry on Friday night signaled that things were going south fast.

The 413 rushing yards allowed Friday is the third-worst performance by a Penn State run defense in program history, at least as far back as 1937.

Folks will remember the second-half bludgeoning at the Big House by Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards in 2022, when Michigan ran for 418 yards, but that merely sits at No. 2.

Instead, the most rushing yards allowed by a Penn State team ever was nearly 30 years ago on a chilly day in East Lansing, Michigan, against a legendary head coach who helped torpedo one of Joe Paterno’s better post-1986 teams in emphatic fashion to conclude the 1997 season.

After the robbery of the 1994 season, Penn State maintained its new spot as one of the Big Ten’s premier programs, but couldn’t reach the heights of the historically good squad from 1994.

The Nittany Lions went 9-3 and 10-2 in the two ensuing seasons, with their seasons derailed by rough, unranked losses to Wisconsin and Iowa and by failures to come up big in top-10 road tests.

Momentum, however, carried into 1997.

The Nittany Lions won enough to get invited to the Fiesta Bowl at the end of the 1996 season, where they stomped Texas 43-14.

The game that secured their spot in the prestigious bowl? A gritty win to maintain the Land Grant Trophy against Michigan State at Beaver Stadium in late November.

That momentum saw them ranked No. 1 in the inaugural AP poll that year with a very talented roster: future top-five draft pick Curtis Enis in the backfield; future second-round pick and father of a Penn State volleyball star, Joe Jurevicius, at receiver; and future defensive gamebreakers Courtney Brown and LaVar Arrington II, just breaking in as freshmen and sophomores.

The season began with a dominant 7-0 start, but the team lost its No. 1 ranking after slipping past Minnesota at Homecoming in mid-October, which remains the last time Penn State has been ranked at the top spot.

Sitting No. 2 heading into a massive top-five showdown with No. 4 Michigan, the Nittany Lions got whacked, losing 34-8 to the eventual national champions at home.

Still, they had a chance to finish their season in pretty grand fashion. A blowout in West Lafayette, Indiana, against No. 19 Purdue and a comfortable home win against No. 24 Wisconsin on Senior Day set them up at 9-1 and No. 4 in the country.

A trip to the national championship was off the table due to Michigan’s dominance (and ridiculous pre-BCS bowl tie-ins), but a trip to the Sugar Bowl was there for the taking if they could finish 10-1.

All that stood in Penn State’s path? A 6-4 Michigan State team in East Lansing, led by third-year head coach Nick Saban. What could go wrong?

The Nittany Lions’ defense got a quick stop on the first drive, but Michigan State got new life after punter Paul Edinger was smoked during a kick. The ensuing roughing-the-kicker penalty gave the Spartans the ball back, albeit for just a few plays, as they punted again shortly after.

When Michigan State got the ball back for its second real drive of the game, it began to establish the run, something the Nittany Lions soon found they couldn’t contain.

Chunk plays brought Sparty to the edge of the red zone, but it settled for a field goal, which Edinger missed from 41 yards.

The first quarter wasn’t that bad, as neither team scored for the first 14 minutes. Michigan State, however, drew first blood with 57 seconds left on a beautiful 19-yard throw and catch from Todd Schultz to Gari Scott in the corner of the end zone.

Quarterback Mike McQueary, best known for his role in the sex scandal surrounding then-defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, threw an interception to start the second quarter, giving the Spartans the ball right back.

Once again, gaping holes in the interior of the Penn State defensive line opened up to get Michigan State into chip-shot field-goal range, but another missed kick kept it 7-0.

Another McQueary interception on a deep ball intended for Jurevicius set up Michigan State’s second scoring drive. With under four minutes to play in the half, Marc Renaud took a handoff and dashed to the left side for a 42-yard touchdown run, untouched most of the way.

Penn State narrowed the gap before halftime on a 54-yard scamper to the end zone by Enis and tied it right out of the locker room on a McQueary touchdown pass to Jurevicius, but the final 25 minutes of the game would be all Sparty.

While Renaud was the main nemesis in the first half, Sedrick Irvin tortured the Nittany Lions in the second half. He sprinted through massive gaps between the tackles, to the outside, and everywhere in between. He capped a scoring drive with a 19-yard touchdown to take a lead they wouldn’t relinquish with eight minutes left in the third.

Just 11 seconds later, a McQueary fumble gave Michigan State the ball right back. The defense held strong initially, but Schultz found Irvin out of the backfield for an 8-yard score on 3rd-and-goal to make it 28-14 with 5:02 left in the third.

Every time the Spartans got the ball in the second half, they gave the ball to Irvin, and he ripped off chunk play after chunk play. The few times they threw it, they made big plays downfield. They consistently ran plays to the left, riding the left tackle to create space and punishing the poor discipline from the linebackers and secondary.

Renaud scampered 20 yards to get it inside the 1-yard line in the opening minutes of the fourth before handing it off to Irvin for his third straight touchdown. The next drive, he ripped off gains of 45 and 31 on consecutive plays to score his fourth touchdown, blowing the game open with 10 minutes to play,

A third interception from McQueary kept the humiliation going with 7:42 to play, as defensive lineman Robaire Smith scampered 50 yards for a pick-six. Fortunately, the Nittany Lions were saved from that embarrassment when a holding call brought it back, but the touchdown still happened.

With a huge lead and looking to run out the clock, Michigan State kept running it.

Of course, Irvin took the first handoff, burst to the outside, and got 35 yards against a completely broken defense. Leroy McFadden joined in with a 15-yard run to the goal line and finished the game with another touchdown on the next play, sealing the 49-14 win.

Saban’s crew captured the Land Grant Trophy for the first time ever, defeating Penn State in football for the first time since the trophy was created in 1993. Penn State had won the first four meetings as Big Ten rivals, so Sparty’s day in the sun occurred in its first win over the Nittany Lions since 1966.

Penn State’s horrific end to the season resulted in it being sent to the Citrus Bowl, which it lost to Florida 21-6.

Michigan State made the Alamo Bowl, but got its doors blown off by Washington. The Nittany Lions reclaimed the Land Grant Trophy with an emphatic 51-28 win at Beaver Stadium the following season.

Michigan State tallied 596 yards of offense, an all-time record against Penn State, in the blowout victory. Much of that came from 452 rushing yards and five touchdowns on 58 attempts, a staggering 7.8 yards per attempt.

Irvin carried the ball 28 times for 238 yards and three touchdowns, adding four catches for 24 yards and a receiving touchdown. Renaud was even more efficient, running for 203 yards on just 21 carries with his lone touchdown.

The two became just the second pair of teammates to both rush for 200 yards in the same game, joining Steve Gage and Gordon Brown of Tulsa in 1985. That feat has been replicated several more times, most notably with Javonte Williams and Michael Carter for North Carolina in 2020 and Quinshon Judkins and Zac Evans for Ole Miss in 2022.

The record of 596 yards of offense against Penn State would only hold for four years until Miami broke the 600-yard mark in a September evisceration of the Nittany Lions in 2001, but the rushing record remains firmly in place to this day.