The ritual of winning: Penn States Trace McSorley thrives on routine while constantly breaking fr

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Before he sits alone at his locker and loses himself in the note and medal his mother has just delivered, before he meets his folks on his walk toward the nation’s second-biggest stadium, before he boards one of those ageless blue school buses to get there, the Big Ten’s two-time leading passer throws on headphones, enters the elevator at the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center and is transported to the fourth grade.

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For these fleeting minutes, on the way to the team hotel’s banquet hall for one last pregame refresher course, Trace McSorley is back in his father’s Infiniti G35 as a pre-teen, rocking out to Sum 41’s “Fat Lip,” the staple that has stuck with him all these years later from the eighth edition of the “Now That’s What I Call Music!” series that his old man had in the coupe at the time.

A more modern rap hit or two might sneak its way into his head these days if the time allows. But this period is limited, the only stretch in which McSorley lets himself be consumed by music — not on the bus ride, not in the locker room, not on the field while he is warming up.

“Honestly, I’d rather listen to music,” he says of those moments, “but that’s just what I’ve done, and I’m not gonna change it now.”

This is the thing about Trace McSorley, or any member of the McSorley family, for that matter. They have their rituals and routines, their symbols and superstitions. Ask his mother, Andrea, for an example of her providential ways, and she will laugh: “After next season you can call me and ask me the same question, and I’ll tell you another one. There’s one that I have, but I’m gonna hold it to myself.”

When Trace entered Ashburn’s Briar Woods High after a memorable run through the Northern Virginia youth football circuit, his mother cautioned him on how things would not be so easy at the prep level; he went on to win a state title as a freshman.

When those Falcons approached Trace’s sophomore year down four graduated all-state players, Andrea figured things might get rougher on her son; he won state title No. 2 anyway.

Enter junior year, another pair of all-staters having just graduated — including future NFL cornerback Alex Carter — and a similar message came from Mom; the same result, too, for son.

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Turns out Trace could only manage a state-title game berth, not a win, in his last go-round, after Briar Woods moved up a division and the program lost four all-staters from a loaded junior squad that included Cam Serigne, who would go on to become the most prolific tight end in ACC history at Wake Forest.

Two years of starting in Happy Valley have yielded two New Year’s Six berths, a Big Ten title and a rewriting of the school record books. Trace enters his fifth and final season down the NFL’s No. 2 draft pick and one of the best offensive minds in the biz, which is a long-winded way of saying here we go again.

His mother’s godmother, her Aunt Carmen, is the prayer warrior of the family, the woman everyone turns to for spiritual guidance. She is the one responsible for the St. Benedict medal Mom hands off to her son every week — at hotels the night before away games, en route to Beaver Stadium when home-bound — and it is often accompanied by a note. The medal wards off spiritual and physical dangers, and the letter from Andrea offers encouragement or humor, depending on the mood.

Andrea and her husband, Rick, drove around town in a panic ahead of the Temple game in 2016, having forgotten the medal on their dresser. Rick, wearing a dog tag that Trace’s coach had given him in high school, improvised. Andrea reconciled the matter as a changing of the mojo, with the Nittany Lions having just lost at rival Pitt a week earlier.

Trace has borne that badge ever since, through 21 wins across the past 25 games, his 6-foot, 198-pound frame belying an arm that has shot him atop Penn State’s career marks for touchdown passes (59) and total offense (8,268 yards), among other categories. It is an arm that has worked overtime lately thanks to his signature home-run celebrations, with 75 of his 77 total scores (another record) having come the past two seasons.

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Mississippi State head coach Joe Moorhead helped bring that hair-on-fire approach out of him, arriving as Penn State’s offensive coordinator in 2016 after consecutive 7-6 seasons, ushering in the McSorley Era and oozing confidence every step of the way.

“The teams that he’s been around, the ones that are out there being passionate, flying around and enjoying it, are the ones where that’s been the most successful, so he told us his mentality,” McSorley says of Moorhead. “We’re going into one of our scrimmages in spring ball, he said: ‘We’re gonna run this play, we’re gonna score a touchdown and then we’re all gonna go to the end zone and celebrate like effin’ madmen’ — I think was the quote that he said.”

Proper protocol was concocted in a meeting in the receivers’ room, McSorley and fellow quarterback Billy Fessler mulling celebratory ideas such as a golf swing with their cohorts before the light bulb flashed and a new tradition was born.

The fall will offer McSorley the chance to further nationalize the dinger, as he goes about extending a school-best streak of 28 consecutive games with a touchdown pass and eclipsing predecessor Christian Hackenberg as the program’s top passer (he’s 1,088 yards away).

Preseason Heisman Trophy buzz is inevitable for a player who in 2017 alone upped his completion rate by nearly nine percentage points (66.5) while adding almost a yard to his rushing average (3.4). McSorley’s father was raised in Staten Island before moving to Fort Lauderdale, one ferry ride and a few subway stops short of Times Square’s PlayStation Theater, where the stiff-armed trophy is annually handed out. Roots remain in the area, though the McSorleys have regrettably never made it to the 164-year-old ale house in lower Manhattan that bears their surname.

To toast there will require a transition as seamless as this spring’s, when the sultan of swag was no longer in their son’s ear, having been succeeded at coordinator by longtime James Franklin cohort Ricky Rahne.

“He’s a guy that I had identified very early on that, if things went well and the timing made sense, this was the transition, and he has conducted himself as such,” Franklin says of Rahne, noting that Rahne has recruited every quarterback on the roster.

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None has been with him longer than McSorley, whose miscast recruitment as an “athlete” has been well-documented — how he was named all-state at quarterback as a junior and at defensive back as a senior; how he was offered as a safety by then-Vanderbilt defensive coordinator Bob Shoop but sold to the staff as a signal-caller by Rahne; how Shoop was barred from so much as saying hello to McSorley on his visit, such was the Commodores’ conviction in the prospect’s position.

“When you list out all the characteristics that you’re looking for at the quarterback position, he’s got a checkmark at every box except for body type and possibly just raw arm strength,” Franklin says. “But everything else he’s got a checkmark in. And to me, the guys that I’ve been around, the most successful guys that have been able to sustain it long term, they don’t have one or two really sexy traits, but they have a number of boxes checked off for you.”

Franklin left Nashville for Central Pennsylvania in 2014 but brought McSorley along with him, the transition marking a tense few days that, as Andrea McSorley will tell you, fell into place exactly as they should have.

Her son was named Richard after his father, who was named after his grandfather. Two Ricks in the house became too many, nothing else stuck during that first month of his life, and then one Sunday a Dolphins game came across the family TV. The announcers revealed that Miami pass rusher Trace Armstrong had gotten his name after being born Raymond Armstrong III, so the forename “Trace” made sense.

Trace McSorley stuck, and all these years later so has Armstrong: He is Franklin’s agent.

“Son of a gun, I cannot believe that guy’s gonna steal our coach,” Andrea recalls of her reaction to Franklin’s move from Vanderbilt. “At the time I was mad about it, but then it worked out. ‘Well, OK, maybe I do like him now.’ It just was a coincidence.

“Without getting too off on a tangent, I do believe God speaks to you in a lot of different ways, so that was, to me, you just have to listen to the signs.”

Despite having a father who once roamed the secondary at the University of Richmond and an uncle who had played fullback at Marshall, McSorley’s upbringing was not football-focused. His parents signed him up for soccer and tee-ball, and they enabled his affinity for rough-housing with pillow tosses and bed wrestling — their son always rising with a giggle and asking for more — but they were not calculating enough to think they were toughening him up.

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“Hey, if you can stay on your feet and get around and be athletic, you only get so many hits in your life, and I figured why waste them when you’re young?” Rick cracks of his son’s early soccer days.

Adds Andrea of Trace and younger sister Micaela: “The kids never had TVs or computers in their room; you’d rather have the kids outside doing something. So he had a basketball hoop in the driveway, and he was the kid who would stay out there and have a tournament in his own brain for two hours by himself while other kids were watching Pokemon.”

Dan Shain, a longtime area football coach, had seen McSorley play baseball with his youngest son. He loved the way McSorley moved on the field and admired how aggressive he was on the base paths. He reasoned that McSorley had the traits required of a good football player, so he urged the family to sign him up in fourth grade. The only way to guarantee him a spot on Shain’s team, of course, was by having his father coach along with him. So began Rick McSorley’s five-year stint as his son’s youth football coach, a stretch in which the future all-Big Ten passer moonlighted at running back, tight end and whatever other hole the ragtag, butter-fingered, option-based squad needed him to fill.

“It definitely wasn’t the plan that he’d be a quarterback,” Rick says. “I joke I thought he could run. I know my size. I’m 5-9 1/2, I was pretty quick. Genetically, my wife’s Mexican, she’s not a big lady either, so being quarterback, you thought that would be hard. But I thought maybe he could be the next Jason Sehorn out there, so that was the hope.”

McSorley played lacrosse from sixth through ninth grade, too, with his father crediting the sport for helping hone the pocket presence and sixth sense of an undersized quarterback who cut his fumbles from 10 to two in his second year as a college starter.

His high school graduation gift came in the form of an inscription across his right rib cage, the Marianne Williamson quote that became further popularized to McSorley’s generation through the film “Coach Carter”: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

His second, more-visible piece of ink came in the summer of 2016, a manifestation of his father’s inaugural artwork done in Maui nearly two decades earlier. Rick’s father had spent four years in Japan while in the Air Force, and Rick himself had long talked about getting a tattoo to reflect that. Andrea dared him during a family vacation in Maui, so left-handed Rick had a chakra, or Japanese energy symbol, drawn on his right shoulder. (Picture the Greek letter for “pi.”)

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His right-handed son made the same symbol a part of the left shoulder piece he had commissioned the summer before being named Penn State’s starter, though it is hard to notice amid a cross that also features references to Philippians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”) and Psalm 23:4 (“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me”).

In a nod to his mother’s Mexican lineage, McSorley added to the bottom of the tattoo, in Spanish, the prayer on the back of the St. Benedict medal, which translates to: “May the holy cross be my light! May the dragon ever be my overlord!” (Rick added a cross on the inside of his own arm in 2016 to commemorate 30 years since his father’s passing.)

“It’s kind of the easy one when doing an icebreaker,” McSorley says of his roughly 25 percent Hispanic heritage. “Tell something interesting about yourself no one knows.”

Most of his maternal relatives are spread across Southern California. When his great-grandfather recently died, the family got together and counted up all his living descendants: 90, which did not account for in-laws, marriages or the multiple babies on the way. They bought 49 tickets for the Rose Bowl in 2016 and a few dozen for the Fiesta Bowl in 2017, with Trace always welcoming the reunion with his cousins.

“He likes to go home and visit his family because they all think he’s huge,” Andrea says of Trace. “They always say: ‘You’re so tall, you’re so big.

“ ‘I love coming home to you guys. You have no idea what real humans look like.’ ”

Andrea (real estate) and Rick (health care software sales) work from home, and they bought a condo near campus after their son’s freshman year. It makes game weekends easier for the visiting extended family while keeping them close to both their kids, with Micaela having just finished her sophomore year at Penn State.

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Everyone convened the first weekend of May to watch Trace receive his accounting degree, before departing to Cancun for a family vacation. His brief summer itinerary is rather vanilla otherwise, save for a stop near home at George Mason’s EagleBank Arena, where he will be the commencement speaker for his high school alma mater.

For all the attention and acclaim college has brought him, Ashburn is never far from McSorley’s mind. It is where he trained with former Washington Redskins linebacker Eddie Mason and former Olympic sprinter Adam Wooten, where he shed labels that accompanied his size and became a baby-faced assassin, where he honed his voice and harnessed his zest on Charlie Pierce’s powerhouse squads.

“It’s calculated,” Pierce, McSorley’s coach at Briar Woods, says of the gusto that brims beneath the surface. “Same thing with preparation for his commencement speech. It’s gonna be very calculated, and he’s gonna make sure he gets his points to these young people to understand.”

Pierce, the man who gave him that dog tag, the man who unknowingly birthed the talisman that has since been credited with awakening the old power near Mount Nittany, will introduce McSorley at the June 15 ceremony.

“Honestly, I’ve been extremely fortunate in my life where I haven’t had any major tragedy, I haven’t had any real big obstacle,” McSorley says. “I guess the thing that I would probably look back on and say has gotten me to this point is having a chip on my shoulder and being around people who were able to bring that out of me, and bring the determination and work ethic out of me and make sure that chip’s always been on my shoulder.”

Four months before a third season of choreographed chaos, it would not exactly be wrong to state that in the literal sense. Above the tattoo on his left shoulder sits a scar from a labrum tear suffered in his final high school game, visible whenever McSorley ditches sleeves. To draw a metaphor would be hacky, to project would be cliché. He is not, as that pop punk hit goes, another victim of conformity.

(Top photo: Matthew O’Haren / USA TODAY Sports)

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