STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The snow was falling outside the Bryce Jordan Center, but early on, the Illini shots weren’t.

The Nittany Lions came out roaring Tuesday, clawing to a 9-2 lead to open the game, prompting Illinois men’s basketball head coach Bruce Weber to call a 30-second timeout and take most of his starting lineup out of the game.

“We didn’t play well the first 5 minutes of this game,” senior center Mike Tisdale said. “We took some bad shots.”

Though the Illini didn’t improve their shooting out of the timeout, Penn State cooled off, allowing Illinois to inch its way back midway through the first half. But the comeback wouldn’t last for long as turnovers and poor shot selection would continue to plague Illinois all night.

“We shot a lot of quick shots tonight,” Weber said. “We hurt ourselves. We made too many quick plays and they got the bounce and made the plays. I knew this would be close.”

The poor shooting from the Illini came at the hands of yet another zone defense, with Penn State holding the Illinois to 41.3 percent from the field and stifling them from the beyond the arc as well, locking them down to 7 of 16.

“I don’t think we read (the zone) well.” Weber said. “We didn’t make some of the passes we had to and we didn’t get the ball down in the lane when we had to.”

The Illini defense came to life at the 2:57 mark of the first half when it forced the Nittany Lions to commit a shot clock violation, and didn’t look back from there. Illinois went on an 8-0 run, led by Tisdale, who finished the half with nine points, to close out the period and pull even with Penn state at 25.

After halftime, though, the Illini reverted back to the spotty play that plagued them in the first half. With 15 turnovers on the night, Illinois continually let Penn State back into the game, and Talor Battle made the Illini pay with two clutch 3-pointers in the half.

Battle drained a 30-foot shot with the shot clock expiring and Bill Cole in his face at the 12-minute mark to put Penn State up 42-40 and then helped them pull away 55-51 with 4:25 remaining.

“I told them they need to find a way to win,” Weber said. “They beat us on the Matto chart. We can’t always give in.”

With the game on the line and the score knotted up at 55 in the waning seconds, Penn State put the ball in Battle’s hands, but a missed shot found Andrew Jones for the put back slam and helped Penn State secure its second straight home win against a ranked Big Ten opponent.

“When (Battle) goes to the bucket, he is going to have two or three defenders on him,” Jones said. “I don’t know why Tisdale left me but he did and I put in the bucket.”