Penn State football coach Joe Paterno continued to remain optimistic after the thrashing his team received.
"I have to analyze the tapes and see what to do," Paterno said. "We never quite got into the groove [this season] and it's not their fault, it's mine. I'm just glad this game is over. I want to get out of here, get on a plane, go home and hug my wife."
After playing close in all of the losses until Saturday, the Lions took a giant step in the wrong direction.
Paterno said that his team wasn't sharp.
"I thought we had a shot at halftime," Paterno said. "Then everything went down. We didn't play well. There is no other way to put it. Had Michigan State caught the ball a little bit better, they would have won by 20 more points."
The Lions trailed at the half by 18 and surrendered a key score three minutes before the break when the Spartans drove 97 yards for a touchdown.
Facing a third-and-13 on his own 6-yard line, Spartans quarterback Jeff Smoker found a wide-open Kyle Brown for 40 yards. Cornerback Alan Zemaitis slipped down when Brown broke up the field on a double move. The Spartans' drive didn't see another third down until Smoker found Eric Knott on a crossing pattern for a 14-yard touchdown.
Brown made another big play when he caught a short hitch pass and made Rich Gardner miss the tackle, then broke an arm tackle of Anwar Phillips, sprinting 80 yards into the end zone.
Penn State's pass defense, which was ranked No. 1 in the Big Ten, was exposed by Smoker, who finished with 356 yards and tied a career-high with four touchdowns passes.
"On the one, Zemaitis just slipped," Paterno said. "The other one the statistics make it look like a big pass play, but we missed tackles. Then you start to take chances and you get a little reckless, you have to make something happen. "
Smoker had an open receiver on the field on virtually every play. The question after a while became whether the Spartans were going to catch it.
Michigan State remembered the 61-7 drubbing from a year ago, as it continued to throw the ball in the fourth quarter when the outcome of the game was no longer in question.
Partially, it was due to the inability to continually run the football. Penn State's run defense has been much maligned all season, but only yielded 119 yards.
Tyrell Dortch was the leading rusher with 50 yards, including a 14-yard touchdown run.
Of the 119 yards, 29 of them came when back-up quarterback Drew Stanton took the direction snap out of the punt formation and spun away from a couple of Penn State defenders, including Andrew Guman in the backfield.
But regardless, Michigan State wanted to win big to get rid of the taste from a year ago.
"It sucks. Payback sucks," said Michigan State's Greg Taplin, who was in the Lions backfield all afternoon and recorded three sacks. "It was an awful feeling. We were just sitting on the sideline, it was like 20 degrees outside. The coaches didn't want to be there, we didn't want to play no more and it was terrible. All this week, that is what we were hearing, 61-7. We needed to get here and pay these guys back."
Penn State will have a lot of teams to pay back next season.
