Penn State coach Matt Campbell didn’t dodge the question about his end-of-half approach at Washington. Three days later, he leaned into it.
“Let’s get into it,” Campbell said with a smile at his weekly press conference.
And then he did exactly that, laying out why he chose to sit on the ball and keep three timeouts in his pocket instead of pushing the pace before halftime. The Nittany Lions were up 28-6 at the time and, after surviving with a 28-25 win, Campbell had the benefit of explaining the call from the winning side.
The sequence started with Penn State backed up at its own 15-yard line and 1:49 left on the clock. Washington still had three timeouts, and Campbell made sure to point that out right away.
“They had three timeouts, too,” he said.
Penn State opened the drive well enough. Carson Hansen picked up 10 yards and a first down on the second play.
Then Washington got to quarterback Rocco Becht for a one-yard sack, and that changed everything for Campbell. Instead of using a timeout and resetting for another shot, he let the clock drain and snapped the ball again with 15 seconds left.
From his perspective, the risk of a mistake outweighed the chance to squeeze out one more play.
“The last thing I wanted to do is go three-and-out and give them the ball back,” Campbell said. “We got our first first down, but we took a negative play. We took a sack, made it second-and-11.
“From my end, we had the momentum [in the game]. To me, the last thing that I wanted to do - we weren’t still in a great field -position standpoint, probably would have taken one more first down - [was give Washington the ball back]. If we would have had a positive completion there, I probably would have taken the timeout.
“I think my bigger fear was us having to punt the ball back. Number one, punting the ball in that situation, something poor could happen.
Number two, we were getting the ball coming out in the second half. I just didn’t want to make a mistake there.”
That final line said plenty.
“I just didn’t want to make a mistake there.”
It also fit a pattern. Campbell had taken a similar approach in Penn State’s 24-20 loss to Wisconsin in September, when the Nittany Lions led 17-0 in the first half and still had a 10-point cushion in the fourth quarter. He said then that he coached “not to screw it up.”
At Washington, the situation looked like one where Penn State could have been more aggressive. The Nittany Lions had 53 seconds left after the sack and still had all three timeouts.
A timeout would not have guaranteed a punt or forced a bad decision. It would have given Becht and the offense a chance to regroup and maybe take another shot.
Second-and-11 wasn’t much different from second-and-10 in that spot, especially with Chase Sowell believing he was “unguardable” and Washington showing man coverage against him. There was still a play to be made.
Instead, Campbell chose the safer path. He leaned away from the possibility of a positive gain and toward the fear of a negative one. That suggested some discomfort with letting his offense keep pushing, or at least with trusting Becht to keep the drive clean in that moment.
After the game, Campbell praised Becht for his “veteranness” and “poise” and said he wanted more of that from the outside. “Hopefully the writing on the quarterback will be a lot better today than maybe it has been,” he said.
But in that end-of-half sequence, Campbell didn’t seem fully comfortable letting his veteran quarterback run the 2-minute drill. He also didn’t seem eager to put his defense back on the field against a Washington offense that still had three timeouts, even though the Huskies had been held to six points.
“Again, I think it’s a really fair question,” Campbell said. “We talked about it after the game.
If you don’t take the negative play there, then I probably don’t put ourselves in that situation. But with the negative play, I just felt like it was risky with the lead that we had and us getting the ball back [to start the second half].”
That caution stands in contrast to the way Campbell has handled fourth down. Penn State leads the Big Ten and ranks first nationally among FBS teams in fourth-down success rate, going 14-for-18, or 77.8 percent. The Nittany Lions were 2-for-3 on fourth down at Washington, with the only miss coming on a failed hook-and-ladder in the second half.
So the aggression is there at times. But Campbell can also fall back on an older-school style built around defense and field position.
That approach can work in some places. Against faster teams with more offensive talent spread around the country, it can become a problem.
It already has, at least once this season, in the loss to Wisconsin at home.
After the Washington game, Campbell was asked what he had learned from that defeat.
“Don’t sit back, right, and just assume it’s going to happen,” he said. “I put that [loss] as much on anybody else as me, and so I thought the biggest thing for me is trying to help our guys regain their poise.
We don’t just want them to have poise. Go lead them to have some poise and help them get through it.”
That advice would have applied to his own decision-making at the end of the first half in Washington.
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