No Big Ten Refs For Penn State-SMU

Originally posted on Nittany Sports Now | By Joe Smeltzer | Last updated Dec 10, 2024 5:07 PM ET

In news that will be welcome to many Penn State fans, the team’s first-round College Football Playoff matchup won’t feature Big Ten refs.

Per Football Zebras, a site which focuses on— as one could imagine— officiating, not only will Big Ten refs not be working Penn State-SMU, they won’t be working any of the four quarterfinal matchups, nor will any refs from the ACC.

The College Football Playoff starts Friday night, when No. 7 Notre Dame hosts No. 10 Indiana at 8. The remaining three games will be played Saturday. Penn State kicks it off against SMU at noon, followed by three more games.

CONTROVERSY IN INDY

Photo by Matt Lynch, Nittany Sports Now: Penn State coach James Franklin

Penn State fans weren’t too pleased with how the refs performed in Saturday’s 45-37 Big Ten title loss to Oregon, and neither was Coach James Franklin.

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 State’s 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, ‘Okay, we’ll slow down so they can review the call.’ 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 Allarended 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.”