Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Penn State Football: Iowa Shouldn’t Blame Nittany Lion Injuries for Slow and Boring Offense

As the fallout of Penn State-Iowa drags on for yet another day – mainly the ongoing allegation Penn State players faked injuries or in the very least embellished them to slow down Iowa’s offensive momentum – it appears worth noting nobody actually knows, and anyone who might actually know is never going to say.

So yes, Penn State may have decided the best way to beat Iowa was to slow down the Hawkeyes however it could, including fake injuries. Just disregard the fact Iowa’s offense is ranked 120th in yards per game, or the fact the Hawkeyes ran two fewer plays than the Nittany Lions on Saturday but had the ball for 11 more minutes than Penn State.

Don’t worry about Iowa’s yards per play either; the Hawkeyes now average 4.65 yards per snap, which is 121st in the nation out of 130 teams. (Iowa had just six plays all game over 10 yards – for comparison Ohio State averages 8.55 yards per play.)

Don’t think too hard about the fact Iowa huddles.

Don’t think too hard about the fact Iowa only had three plays all game that went for more than 20 yards, converted less than 40% of its third down attempts, went into the victory formation and then ended up having to punt the ball anyway or scored just 10 points when having to start a drive on its own side of the 50. Don’t think too hard about the fact Iowa fans booed the wind for knocking the ball off the tee, or think too hard about booing PJ Mustipher for being hurt nearly as soon as the game started.

Perhaps most important of all, don’t think too hard about the fact Penn State appeared to be on the verge of having the game in hand before Sean Clifford was injured.

All of those things are true, and yes it is entirely possible Penn State decided whenever Iowa did something good the best course of action was to fall over and play dead.

Slowing down a bit here, the challenge in moments like this is not carrying Penn State’s water for it. Because I don’t really know if James Franklin told his players to fall over and play hurt. I just don’t. I know that it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but I don’t know for a fact it isn’t true. I also hate things like this because you are required to have an opinion about something that doesn’t matter and frankly I really don’t care if Penn State wins or loses. As far as rooting interests go, I just care if Ben Simmons can pass his COVID test and if Jalen Hurts can throw the ball to the correct team.

Sighs.

But now that we’re talking about…

It seems odd that Penn State faking injuries would happen now. The Nittany Lions have annually been one of the few programs to give Ohio State a run for its money and have done so in straightforward fashion. They have never had a swath of real or fake injuries plague the team, subsequently slowing down the Buckeyes’ high-powered offense. If anyone would be accusing Penn State of such a thing it would be Urban Meyer or Ryan Day. And yet…

Beyond Ohio State, James Franklin has been at Penn State for almost a decade and has been at the helm for nearly 100 games. Even in the sanction era, when Penn State needed all the help it could get, nobody was falling over in theatrical pain and nobody was accusing anyone of faking it.

Heck, look at the Wisconsin game. Safety Jaquan Brisker was hurt roughly every other play and Wisconsin fans never booed that because even in the first week of the season the Badger faithful understood that that offense wasn’t exactly Oregon in the peak of the Chip Kelly era.

Gonna slow them down? Okay, gonna go grab a beer.

Simply put, Franklin has been at Penn State for ages and not a single team has ever accused Penn State of faking injuries. Not even the teams that are faster, better and more potent than Iowa.

All of the finger pointing aside, it’s just a strange and unfortunate way to go about the issue during an era when player health and safety is at the forefront of the conversation. Because ultimately two things are possible: a player is hurt, or he isn’t.

Much like me, Iowa fans, Kirk Ferentz and his entire coaching staff don’t know if those players were hurt — well, aside from the three or four who never played another snap. They just don’t. So given the opportunity to choose between keeping their mouths shut or being skeptical, they choose to boo and make accusations. Then again this is the same program that had 13 players hospitalized following offseason workouts, so there’s that. Not to mention the precedent it sets to assume any injury is a fake one, and the sportsmanship lost working from that standpoint.

At the end of the day it’s truly one of those things that doesn’t really matter. Maybe Penn State did try to slow Iowa’s offense down by faking injuries. That is technically cheating and part of the reason why there are rule changes on the way around the issue.

But it’s also possible guys got hurt, thought they were hurt, cramped up or maybe Iowa’s offense is so boring that anything good happening is so memorable that anything that happens afterwards becomes memorable too.

When it’s all said and done this entire saga is stupid because it doesn’t even really matter, and given the chance to move on Big Ten elder statesman Kirk Ferentz opted not to, and that’s stupid too.

You know you’re complaining too much when you won and you sound like you lost.