Heading into Saturday afternoon’s clash against Northwestern, Penn State was one of just nine teams across the country that had yet to lose a fumble. In fact Penn State’s two fumbles all season was a mark bettered by just 10 teams with not a single team in America having yet to cough up the ball.
So the fact the Nittany Lions left Saturday’s game having fumbled the ball four times while subsequently losing all of them was a pretty remarkable fact. To put that into perspective, Penn State lost five fumbles all of last season through 13 games and lost just three in 2017 during an era of extreme sure-handedness by Saquon Barkley (who was not accountable for any of those three fumbles).
Of course, Saturday’s weather was particularly noteworthy as rain poured from the sky for the entire afternoon. Northwestern for its own part entered the day having lost seven fumbles already this year and added two more to that total with a third fumble recovered by the Wildcats. In total the game saw eight total turnovers with at least one Sean Clifford should-have-been-interception dropped.
Good weather or not, Penn State coach James Franklin sees nothing but a need to improve ball security in a young running back room more than horrible weather being a convenient explanation for a fumble-happy outing.
“I’m never going to allow the weather to be an excuse,” Franklin said. “We’ve got to protect the football. Part of ball security is pad level, you have to take shots with the top of your pads. Obviously, you can’t take on a helmet with the ball, that won’t end well. The weather will never be an excuse for us. We obviously need to continue working there. We don’t go inside when it rains and sometimes they’re looking at me like I’m crazy, like what do we have the indoor facility for?”
Franklin dodging weather as an excuse on Saturday is probably not all wrong, but if the Nittany Lions can protect the ball like they have all year and most of Franklin’s tenure at Penn State when the weather is nice, then Saturday might just be a strange outlier.
Of course if it rains when the Nittany Lions take on the likes of Michigan and Ohio State, there will be no time like the present to show improvement when conditions are less than perfect.
