UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ryan Barker knows how quickly one loss can become two.
Then three. Then four.
Penn State experienced that painful lesson a season ago, when a six-game losing streak turned a disappointing stretch into something much larger.
That history makes Saturday’s 24-20 loss to Wisconsin more than a frustrating night at Beaver Stadium. The Nittany Lions have now lost seven of their last 10 Big Ten games dating back to last season, and with a short turnaround before Friday night’s trip to Northwestern, Penn State has little time to dwell on another conference defeat.
For Barker, the solution sounds simple.
Flush it.
“You just have to keep pushing,” Barker said. “That’s kind of the moral of the whole story. You just have to take it one day at a time, one play at a time, one game at a time, and the results should take care of themselves.”
That perspective carries more weight coming from someone who experienced last season’s downward spiral.
Barker watched Penn State struggle to stop the bleeding once the losses began piling up. Now, after the first defeat of the Matt Campbell era, the challenge is making sure the Wisconsin loss remains an isolated failure rather than the beginning of another trend.
Penn State doesn’t have much time to process it.
The Nittany Lions travel to Northwestern for a Friday night game, meaning film corrections and whatever emotional processing comes from the Wisconsin loss have to happen quickly.
“As a team, we’ll make the corrections,” Barker said. “We’ll come in, watch the film and figure out what we did wrong and what we need to fix going into Northwestern this week.”
Then it has to disappear.
“For me individually, you have to flush it,” Barker said. “I view it as I have to wake up tomorrow and forget what happened today. Hopefully the team can adopt that, but at the bare minimum, by Monday morning we should be Northwestern, Northwestern, Northwestern, Northwestern.”
Barker has become one of Penn State’s most dependable players while quietly climbing the program’s record book.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.In his third season as Penn State’s kicker, Barker ranks first in program history in field-goal percentage at 88.9% among kickers with at least 25 attempts. His 40 made field goals are tied for seventh in school history, while his 109 extra points rank eighth. Barker also sits seventh with a 98.2% career extra-point percentage.
That reliability has helped establish Barker as more than a specialist.
Campbell formed a leadership group shortly after arriving at Penn State, consisting of every senior and a select group of underclassmen. Barker said he is one of roughly five non-seniors included in the group, which meets with Campbell twice each week to discuss what players are seeing inside the program.
That group could become particularly important now.
Penn State has already lived through what happens when adversity compounds. The Nittany Lions can’t afford to allow frustration from Wisconsin to follow them to Evanston.
Barker’s kicking mentality provides a fitting blueprint.
After missing a field goal against Temple earlier this season, Barker didn’t allow one miss to become another.
“I hate the feeling of missing,” Barker said. “It’s really awful.”
But the answer isn’t obsessing over the previous kick.
“The one-kick mentality is a real thing,” Barker said. “Being able to flush each kick, not just the game itself, but each kick individually having that ability is crucial.”
Penn State now needs to apply that mentality to an entire season.
One bad night doesn’t have to become a bad month. One Big Ten loss doesn’t have to become another six-game slide.
But after losing seven of its last 10 conference games, Penn State has reached the point where reversing that trend requires more than talking about adversity.
The Nittany Lions have to show they learned from it.
