The Penn State Nittany Lions fell 45-37 to the Oregon Ducks in the Big Ten Championship Game on Saturday night, and James Franklin seems to think the officiating played a significant role in the loss.
During his postgame press conference, James Franklin had some pretty strong comments against the officiating.
“There wasn’t one holding call in the game, so that’ll be interesting to watch,” Franklin said after the game according to SportsKeeda. “And I don’t want to come off the wrong way. I give Oregon a ton of credit, but the penalties were pretty lopsided.”
Franklin seemed most concerned about some calls that he believed should have been reviewed.
“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 need to be reviewed need to be reviewed in my opinion,” Franklin said.
Specifically, Franklin was not happy that a late-game pass to Omari Evans was not reviewed by officials.
“There was a couple of calls that we didn’t get that I thought we should have,” Franklin said. “One of the calls that I thought was critical point in the game was the two-minute drive with a catch on the sideline to Omari, I thought that was a catch. And looking at the Jumbotron, it looked like it was a catch.
“I get you’re going to miss some calls, but it’s two minutes. So everybody says, okay, well, slow down so they can review the drive. It’s a two minute drive. We can’t slow down. In a critical game like that, in my opinion, they should have buzzed down and checked that.”
Despite the loss, Penn State still qualified for a College Football Playoff spot as the No. 6 seed where they will host No. 11 seed SMU.
We’ll have to see how Penn State performs.
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