Penn State’s Trace McSorley Is College Football’s Master of the Deep Ball
In an age when most programs are spreading the field horizontally, the Nittany Lions have built their offense around going long. That’s thanks to a passer with big goals and an even bigger arm.
Richard Thomas McSorley III is a man of two nicknames. The first is “Trace,” a moniker he’s long preferred and the name by which the Penn State quarterback is known on a national level. The second is “All the Marbles,” so bestowed for his penchant for the long ball. In his debut season as college starter, McSorley led the Nittany Lions to their first Big Ten title since 2008, a Rose Bowl berth, and an 11–3 record and no. 7 ranking in the final AP poll. And he did it largely by showing a willingness to heave it deep.
McSorley entered the season quietly, overlooked as pundits focused on running back Saquon Barkley and questioned head coach James Franklin’s job security. He ended it squarely in the spotlight, throwing for 3,614 yards with 29 touchdowns and only eight interceptions. Of his completed passes, 28.6 percent went for 20 yards or more, and such attempts accounted for more than 46 percent of his total yardage through the air. Some of this production was the result of the team’s play-calling philosophy; some of it was his natural instinct and need to air it out.
Late in the third quarter against Minnesota in a game some call the turning point of Penn State’s season, McSorley showed his deep-ball potential. The Nittany Lions were then 2–2, coming off a 49–10 thrashing at fourth-ranked Michigan, and entered halftime against the Golden Gophers down by 10. After pulling his team even at 13, McSorley stepped up to his own 41-yard line and called for the ball.
He catches it in the shotgun and drops back three steps. The pocket begins to collapse immediately, so McSorley moves right and races toward the line of scrimmage. He keeps his eyes locked downfield, then unleashes. Tight end Mike Gesicki is wide open, corrals the ball at the Minnesota 23, and rumbles to the 6 before being taken down. Two plays later, Trace runs in to score a touchdown in what would become a 29–26 win.
“We do it a lot of times in practice,” McSorley told PennLive last November, speaking on throwing deep on broken plays. “Coach [Joe] Moorhead is always saying, ‘Move in the pocket with your eyes downfield. Never let your eyes look at the rusher, always keep your eyes up.’”
Penn State’s offensive strategy is rare. The deep ball is dying, both in college and the NFL, as teams are increasingly opting for shorter, safer passes and spreading the field horizontally more than they are vertically. Yet while others moved toward conservative play-calling, Penn State doubled down last season. McSorley passed for 9.3 yards per attempt; of quarterbacks whose teams finished in the top 25, only Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield and Western Michigan’s Zach Terrell finished with a higher average.
The Nittany Lions’ offense was consistently dangerous from deep, with more than 41 percent of its touchdowns coming on plays of 20-plus yards. Clemson, which won the national championship and boasted its own explosive offense, checked in at 26 percent in the same metric. With such a large share of Penn State’s success last year dependent on McSorley’s gunslinging tendencies, it’s a safe bet to assume he’ll keep throwing deep this fall.
Before the 2016 campaign, the most anyone had seen of McSorley came during his extended cameo in the prior season’s TaxSlayer Bowl against Georgia. Christian Hackenberg, the former no. 1 quarterback recruit who was once projected to be the top overall pick in the NFL draft, exited in the second quarter with a shoulder injury. McSorley, an unheralded three-star recruit out of Ashburn, Virginia, replaced him. Hackenberg’s tenure with the Nittany Lions was a massive disappointment — he never led the program to more than seven wins in a year and seemed to regress behind a porous offensive line — and while McSorley played well in limited action, few could have predicted what would happen next.
Under the guidance of first-year coordinator Moorhead, McSorley started modestly last fall, winning his opening game against Kent State but forcing an unnecessary late-game bomb in a loss to rival-that’s-also-not-a-rival Pitt. After a .500 start, though, McSorley sparked the team to nine straight wins, including victories over national semifinalist Ohio State and sixth-ranked Wisconsin, before losing a heartbreaker to USC in the Rose Bowl.
A number of factors contributed to the win streak. Barkley was as dominant as ever. Star linebackers Brandon Bell and Jason Cabinda returned from injuries at the right time. And McSorley’s two favorite targets, Chris Godwin (now with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and Gesicki, stepped up and made plays. But McSorley was the engine. From the win over Minnesota through the Big Ten championship game, he threw 20 touchdowns against two interceptions. And there was a pattern: In June, 247Sports’ Andrew Callahan wrote that nearly a quarter of McSorley’s pass attempts went for more than 20 yards and that he completed nearly 45 percent of them. In games when he failed to throw deep at least four times, Penn State went 1–2.
Without the threat of the deep ball, defenses could have loaded up against Barkley or targeted receivers on shorter routes. McSorley gave Penn State options. And to his credit, Barkley took full advantage. Last year, the back tallied almost 1,900 yards from scrimmage with 22 total touchdowns. For Penn State to continue winning this season, it will need McSorley to keep connecting on his bombs, thus unlocking the run game. Live by the long ball, die by the long ball.
Still, don’t think that McSorley throws deep simply for the sake of it. He’s patient, scanning the field for good matchups. “Not only is he throwing the deep ball well,” Moorhead told USA Today in December. “He’s throwing it to the right person when he’s open.”
Expectations are high in Happy Valley this season. Barkley and McSorley are both Heisman Trophy candidates, and Penn State returns 16 starters, including Gesicki, who many believe is among the best tight ends in the country. Yes, the sixth-ranked Nittany Lions have to replace 24 starts on the offensive line, and their schedule is tough, particularly during a three-week stretch from October 21 to November 4 when they have to play Michigan, Ohio State, and Michigan State in succession. Still, they have the playmakers to build on their success. And McSorley is the leader to guide them.
Throwing the ball deep can sometimes leave Penn State open to mistakes, but with “All the Marbles” making decisions under center, there’s a good chance they’ll end up in the playoff hunt once again. Just ask Moorhead, who praised his young quarterback’s gunslinging impulses earlier this month.
“A kid couldn’t lead the league in multiple passing categories and set school single-season records and be on the verge of multiple other school records if he was just throwing the ball indiscriminately down the field,” Moorhead said. “The things that we did throwing the ball down the field, they didn’t happen by chance, they happened by choice.”