Ryan Barker has seen this movie before, and he knows how fast it can turn ugly.
One loss can start with a bad night, then snowball into something much bigger. Penn State lived through that last season, when a six-game losing streak dragged a rough stretch into a full-blown slide.
So after Saturday’s 24-20 loss to Wisconsin, there’s no luxury of sitting around and stewing on it. The Nittany Lions are back in action Friday night at Northwestern, and the next test is already waiting.
Barker’s message is blunt: 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 advice matters more coming from a player who lived through last year’s spiral. Barker watched Penn State struggle to stop the bleeding once the losses started stacking up. Now the challenge is making sure Wisconsin is just one bad result, not the start of another run in the wrong direction.
Penn State doesn’t get much breathing room. With the short week, the correction process has to be quick and efficient, and the emotional reset has to happen almost immediately.
“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 comes the part that matters most.
“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.”
That steady approach has helped make Barker one of Penn State’s most dependable players, even as he’s climbed into the program’s record book.
In his third season as the Nittany Lions’ kicker, Barker leads Penn State 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, his 109 extra points rank eighth, and his 98.2% career extra-point percentage places him seventh.
His role goes beyond just making kicks, too. Campbell put together a leadership group shortly after arriving at Penn State, made up of every senior and a select handful of underclassmen. Barker said he’s one of about five non-seniors in that group, which meets with Campbell twice a week to talk through what players are seeing around the program.
That kind of voice could matter even more now.
Penn State has already seen how adversity can multiply if it isn’t checked quickly. After losing seven of its last 10 Big Ten games dating back to last season, the Nittany Lions can’t let the Wisconsin loss spill over into another week.
Barker’s own kicking approach offers the cleanest example of how to handle it. After missing a field goal against Temple earlier this season, he didn’t let one mistake linger.
“I hate the feeling of missing,” Barker said. “It’s really awful.”
Still, the fix isn’t to carry that frustration into the next snap.
“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 needs that same mindset now, only on a bigger scale. One loss doesn’t have to become two. Two doesn’t have to become a streak.
But after seven Big Ten losses in its last 10 conference games, the Nittany Lions are past the point where words alone will solve anything. Now they have to prove they can move on.
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