Syracuse QB Kyle McCord ends the hellish game with a loss to Pittsburgh

He also somehow ran nine times for minus-32 yards.

“I’ve never been beaten like that at any level of football,” McCord said.

McCord had one of the worst games you've ever seen from a quarterback at any level on Thursday in a prime-time showdown between two teams hoping to make an ACC statement.

The Panthers, now 7-0, certainly sent a warning to the world.

And Syracuse, which fell to 5-2, did so for all the wrong reasons.

McCord threw his first pick-six with 12:47 left in the first quarter to give Pittsburgh a 7-0 lead when linebacker Rasheem Biles skipped a route and threw another a little over six minutes later, making the game 17-0 when linebacker Kyle Louis moved in front of the intended target.

The final pass occurred on a pass on the screen when the ball bounced off running back LeQuint Allen's hands directly to a defender – Allen was suffocated by coverage – and the Panthers took a 31-0 lead.

“This has to be the best performance ever on this team,” Louis said, according to ESPN. “Someone needs to show me something better…We need to be put up against a wall or something after this performance.”

McCord stayed in the game long after the outcome was all but certain, and then he at least provided some comedic relief.

When faced with a third-and-11 at the Panthers' 15-yard line in a 41-13 game, McCord ran to his right to avoid the pressure, but staggered and fell to the ground after attempting to score. stop and go left.

He rolled over as Pittsburgh recorded the easiest sack of its season.

To make matters worse for the Orange, they missed the pointless field goal attempt.

“I think it will be good for us to go back and learn from it,” McCord said. “Of course it sucks, it’s a terrible feeling, but at the same time there’s still a lot of season ahead of us.”

McCord finished the game with a whopping 64 pass attempts, including 35 for 321 yards.

Syracuse coach Fran Brown downplayed his quarterback's blunders.

“I mean, he just had a bad game,” Brown said. “It's part of football, it happens. I think you’ll be able to see what kind of fighter he is if he keeps going from here.”

While McCord is only in his first year at Syracuse, he preached to his teammates that they couldn't let the school's season sink like they did in the past.

“There’s no other way, they beat us tonight,” McCord said. “What I told the guys: Listen, this sucks. There is no way around it. I guess it's something to make light of, but we can't let what Syracuse football has done in the past start to spiral in the wrong direction in the second half of the season. I said to the boys, 'We have way too much talent, we've put in way too much work to make this happen, and from now on everything we do has to be about learning and growing from it.' “