INDIANAPOLIS — It was one of those games where somebody had to ask Penn State coach James Franklin about the officiating, and they did.
A look at the box score and it seemed like Penn State handled Oregon in many of the statistical categories except one big one.
Penalties.
Penn State racked up five for 65 yards. Oregon only had three for 24 yards. Of those five penalties, four were of the 15-yard variety for Penn State: two for face masks and two for unnecessary roughness.
“We just made it harder than it needed to be in the first quarter of the game,” Franklin said in his postgame presser. โAnd it’s hard to do that against this type of opponent.”
Defensively, a physical Oregon front neutralized Penn State and did so without a penalty.
None that was called, that is.
“There wasn’t one holding call in the game, so that’ll be interesting to watch,” Franklin said. “And I don’t want this to come off the wrong way. I give Oregon a ton of credit. But the penalties were pretty lopsided, and I have more of an issue with the ones that could have been reviewed. The non-reviewable ones, they’re gonna happen, but the ones that that need to be reviewed need to be reviewed in my opinion.”
Of course, the penalties make up only one part of the equation in the loss. But the officiating crew had far from a banner day in the review department. Late in the game, they missed a seemingly obvious catch near the sideline by Penn Stateโs Omari Evans that, if completed, could have changed the complexity of the game.
“One of the calls that I thought was a critical point in the game was the two minute drive with the catch on the sideline to Omari. I thought was a catch, and looking on the Jumbotron, it looked like it was a catch,” Franklin said. “I get you’re going to miss some calls, but it’s two minutes, so everybody says, โOkay, we’ll slow down so they can review the call.โ It’s a two minute drive. We can’t slow down in a critical game like that.”
That wasn’t the only play missed by this crew according to Franklin who mentioned a time when Drew Allar ended up on the ground and a player was pulled off a pile.
“It was a time late in the game where I thought they needed to protect Drew, where he was hung up in a pile and kind of got slammed down late,” Franklin said. “There was another time where, you’re not supposed to pull people off the pile, it is what it is, but the catch on the sideline, to me, that’s a critical moment in the game, and it was close enough that it should have been buzzed down and at least reviewed. It is what it is.”
Those calls certainly add up over the course of a game. But Penn State failed to execute when it mattered most and ultimately came up on the losing end of a thrilling game with the Ducks.
The good news for James Franklin and Penn State ย is that this is far from the end of the season.
