Matt Campbell’s fourth-and-1 decision against Wisconsin is still hanging over Iowa State’s Week 4 loss, and his explanation on Tuesday didn’t do much to clear it up.
The sequence came late in the third quarter after Penn State had pushed the lead to 20-10 with a 56-yard field goal drive, then forced Wisconsin into a three-and-out. When the Nittany Lions got the ball back, a five-yard false start on tight end Gabe Burkle was followed by 14 yards over the next three plays, setting up fourth-and-one at their own 38-yard line as the quarter ended.
That’s where Campbell had a choice - and then briefly didn’t. Penn State left its offense on the field to try to coax Wisconsin into jumping offsides. After the TV timeout, Campbell sent the offense back out, then quickly called timeout and brought on the punt team.
On Tuesday, he said the decision had been chewing on him for two days.
“You can debate the heck out of it, cause I have, to be honest with you, for the last 48 hours, but I still feel like, with the flow of the game, what was going on, that’s really why I thought we’re not going to screw around here,” Campbell said in his Tuesday press conference.
He also said, “Coming out of the TV timeout, I was going to go for it, honestly. We had a play called; we knew what we were going to do.
I kind of saw what their alignment was, and for me, I was like, I don’t think we have the advantage here, and thinking about it. I think I was 50/50 on going for it anyways, and I think when I saw what they came out in defensively.”
That look was a Penn State offense in 21 personnel, with an I-formation, James Peoples behind Finn Furmanek, Brett Eskildsen split wide to the field side and Chase Sowell tight to the formation into the boundary. Wisconsin answered with four down linemen crowded around the A-gaps, a MIKE behind them and two stand-up linebackers on the edge. Penn State was clearly showing run, and Wisconsin matched with big bodies, even if the box was only seven.
Campbell said he also didn’t want to keep trying to draw Wisconsin offsides, pointing back to an earlier moment in the game when he believed the Badgers should have been flagged for offsides and weren’t.
“I didn’t want to try to draw them offsides, because I didn’t want to have a situation where we could go offsides,” he said.
That explanation raises its own question: if the plan was to punt anyway, what did the five-yard difference really change? The timeout came with 20 seconds left on the play clock and five seconds before in-helmet communication would have shut off. Even a delay of game would have left Penn State punting from the 33 instead of the 38.
In the end, Wisconsin punted before Penn State got the ball back on one of three straight three-and-outs, so that specific sequence didn’t decide the game. But Campbell’s broader approach did him no favors. The conservative stretch - running on third-and-long, trying to squeeze clock with only a 10-point lead, and generally shrinking the game - started right there on fourth-and-one.
And the clock management didn’t stop there. Penn State could have used that timeout later when it got the ball back down four with 1:13 left, and Campbell also passed on a chance to be aggressive before halftime despite having just over a minute and all three timeouts available.
Asked about the role of analytics, Campbell brushed it off: “The analytics are going to tell you to go for it.”
That may be true, but the bigger issue is that he didn’t sound like a coach fully convinced by his own process. Campbell has not always leaned conservative - he ranked No. 44 in the FBS in fourth-down attempts at Iowa State last year - but he was on Saturday, and it cost him.
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