It was supposed to be different this time with Gary Nova, but we've heard that before, too. A new coordinator, the best one he's had yet. A change in his mechanics, one that nobody in Piscataway had noticed before.

No more sloppy throws. No more bad decisions. Good Gary, the one who has teased Rutgers fans for four years and counting, would be the only Nova on display for this Rutgers offense as it made its Big Ten debut. That was the promise.

So here we are again, earlier than anyone could have predicted, but it's an undeniable, harsh reality. No one wants to read this again. I certainly don't want to write this again. But Penn State was better than Rutgers at exactly one position and won this game, 13-10, and everyone who watched it knows the reason.

Penn State had Christian Hackenberg, and for all the times that the Rutgers defense hounded him and pounded him and forced him out of his comfort zone, he did what the great quarterbacks do. He found a way to lead his team to victory.

He did what Teddy Bridgewater did for Louisville on the same field two years ago, when he was essentially playing on one leg against a Rutgers defense with a half dozen future NFL players. A berth in a major bowl was on the line that night.

This time? A spot in the national conversation and atop the Big Ten East standings, rewarding the record crowd of 52,774 and sending the Nittany Lions back to central Pennsylvania humbled (if that's even possible in the case of head coach James Franklin, that is).

With the way the Rutgers defense was playing – the gutsy, surprising way it had dominated this game no matter how many times the offense threw it into a bad position – that victory was there for the taking. Nova didn't have to be excellent. He didn't even have to be good. He needed to make a few solid throws at key times.

And he couldn't do it.

“We didn't get enough first downs,” the senior co-captain said after completing 15 of 30 passes for 192 yards. “We didn't sustain drives well. I didn't do a good enough job taking care of the ball. I just didn't play winning football today. I need to make better decisions and not just force the ball down the field. I turned the ball over five times, and when you do that, you can't win the game.”

He's right, and trying to this explain away this loss any other way is impossible. Nova threw five interceptions, and even acknowledging that the first two were not his fault, he still threw three more in the second half, and they were all on him.

Still: Just one good throw probably wins this game. Rutgers faced a third and six at the Penn State 44 with about three minutes left. Nova rolled to his left and had two receivers open, but threw a pass high off the hands of tight end Tyler Kroft.

One good throw, and chances are, the fans were racing onto the field. Instead, the Scarlet Knights had to punt for the seventh time, Penn State had the ball back on its 20, and generations of Rutgers fans were curling up into the fetal position.

“There are a lot of throws I want back tonight, but I think the one on third down to Tyler at the end, I just missed him,” Nova said. “If we convert that, we maybe get another first down, run the clock out and win the game.”

He stood in front of the reporters and answered all the questions, because he's mastered that part of this job. He is a senior who has taken the majority of the snaps with the first-team offense for the past eight months, so making a change now will be difficult.

“Not right now,” head coach Kyle Flood said when asked if he'd consider given somebody else – i.e. backup Chris Laviano – a shot. “We just got done playing a really emotional game. We're going to evaluate every player in the program on film and then make the personnel decisions on Sunday and Monday.”

Can Laviano really be any worse? And is it not better for Flood, who benched Nova in favor of a limited Chas Dodd late last season, to roll the dice sooner than later? He knows what he has in Nova, and another year and new offensive coordinator Ralph Friedgen in his ear hasn't changed that.

Nova probably will start against Navy on Saturday. But Flood risks losing this team if he sticks with him after another bad performance, because eventually, players on the defense will get tired of holding up their end of the bargain for nothing in return.

Rutgers could have been protecting the goal posts from charging students on Saturday night, and instead, Flood was left trying to hold together what he called “really a hurting team right now.”

It was a familiar feeling, for a familiar reason.