
That horrendous final play call is going to haunt James Franklin for a long, long time
I’m not sure we’ll ever understand what James Franklin was thinking.
With the game and perhaps Penn State’s B1G Championship and Playoff hopes on the line, Franklin got cute. Not cute in a “let’s run a trick play and roll the dice” way. He got cute in a “this is so dumb they’ll never see it coming” way.
Deciding to hand the ball off the Miles Sanders on a given play is usually a pretty good idea. Sanders came into Saturday night’s contest ranked sixth in FBS in rushing yards. He’d been every bit effective as Saquon Barkley in the first four weeks of the season.
But on Saturday night, that wasn’t the case. At all. Sanders had been contained for 45 yards on 15 carries for the first 59 minutes of action.
Trace McSorley, on the other hand, was anything but bottled up. The Penn State quarterback had a career-high 175 rushing yards on 25 carries, including a career-long 51-yard run. The guy who was the heart and soul of Penn State’s team appeared to be in the midst of a signature performance of his historic career.
So what suggested to Franklin that on 4th and 5, a shotgun handoff to Sanders would be best?
Did an Ohio State fan just yell at Franklin what the play call should be? Did Franklin try that in a video game once and it worked? Did Franklin get a fortune cookie said “when your season is on the line on 4th and 5, pretend its a goal-line play against Kent State” or is that too harsh?
Baffling it is that Franklin made that call after not one, but two timeouts. Instead of watching a record crowd at Penn State celebrate a monumental win, Lions fans left scratching their heads.
What in the world was that?
There’s no doubt that on Saturday night, Ohio State earned everything it got. Nobody should be asking the question “did Penn State lose it or did Ohio State win it?”
It’s both. Every time. Don’t ask dumb questions. But forgive me for asking a different question again.
WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT?!?!?
“We obviously didn’t make the right call in that situation,” Franklin said in his postgame press conference. “That’s on me. Nobody else. That’s on me. We didn’t make the right call in that situation. Obviously it didn’t work. We’ve called something similar to that in other situations and it broke for big plays, but that’s on us. That’s on me.”
Uhhhhhh, ya think?
Regardless of when that play worked, for that to be Franklin’s season-on-the-line call makes no sense. Even a draw play with McSorley, who had been nearly automatic in those spots, would’ve made more sense on 4th and 5.
You see, this game wasn’t like 2 years ago when McSorley looked overwhelmed against the Buckeyes in that monumental Penn State win. McSorley, the same guy who kept Penn State’s Playoff hopes alive with a walk-off touchdown a year ago at Iowa and who had never lost a home game, was special on Saturday night. He delivered the type of performance that when Penn State fans looked back on his career, they’d point to and think, “man, that dude was a gamer.”
McSorley accounted for 461 yards of Penn State’s 492 yards of total offense. Next to the outstanding KJ Hamler, who was sidelined down the stretch after he was shook up following a long catch, it was McSorley or bust.
Franklin decided to go against everything that he’d been preaching about McSorley the last 3 years. The same guy who Franklin repeatedly said “has been winning since he was in diapers,” got the ball taken out of his hands with the game on the line.
People don’t forget that stuff. What they will forget was that for most of the night, Franklin’s team put together a solid defensive performance until screens picked it apart down the stretch.
With the game on the line, Urban Meyer put the ball in Dwayne Haskins’ hands. It didn’t matter that Haskins started out 5 of 14 or that he looked every bit like someone who was ready to “fold” after being hit, just as Shareef Miller said before Saturday’s game.
Haskins didn’t fold. Neither did McSorley. Shoot, neither did Sanders.
Franklin did.
The moment got too big for Franklin. The same coach who earned national honors for leading the Lions to an improbable B1G Championship two years ago is 24-4 since the start of October 2016. It’s a mark that’s undeniably impressive. Nobody can take that away from Franklin.
But Franklin’s teams have lost those 4 games by a combined 8 points…and Penn State had fourth-quarter leads in every one of them.
The most puzzling blown lead came on Saturday night when with the Lions up 12 with 7 minutes to play, he couldn’t find a way to escape with a win. Despite all the success, that one will sting. For a long time.
The funny thing is that nobody is hammering Franklin right now if all he elects to do is let McSorley take a shotgun draw and he gets blown up in the backfield. Now, though, the image that Franklin worked incredibly hard to reshape the past three years, will have a “yeah, but” to it.
“Penn State won a ton of games the last three years and moved itself back into yearly top-10 status.”
“Yeah, but the call Franklin made at the end of that 2018 Ohio State game will always make me question Franklin’s decision-making.”
Last year when Franklin signed that extension that paid him just shy of $6 million annually, he knew that he’d face more pressure than ever before. To his credit, he handled it extremely well.
But on Saturday night with all eyes on Franklin to deliver, he messed up. Badly. He picked the worst time to overthink something.
Now, he’ll have forever to think about that play call.