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No matter the reason, from over-anxious players to a lack of discipline or even some poor officiating from Big Ten officials, Rutgers football has been on the wrong side of a lot of bad penalty calls lately. This past weekend in a 21-7 loss at Northwestern, Rutgers saw penalties kill their own drives and help sustain Northwestern moving the ball.
On Saturday, Rutgers had 11 penalties for 91 yards. The week before in a loss to Michigan State, the Scarlet Knights were penalized seven times for 65 yards.
The week before that in a blowout loss to Ohio State, Rutgers had just 25 penalty yards and three penalties.
“We’ve been trending the wrong direction so you can say we’ve been doing well but we were doing really well the beginning of the year,” Schiano told reporters after the game.
“We were number one in the country and penalties, and then it’s kind of gone like this. Today we fell off a cliff, whether it was [defensive pass interference, whether it was sideline infractions whether it was delay of games.”
One play in the third quarter, where Rutgers was set to go for it on fourth-and-3, typified the struggles of a game that was 14-7 at the time. A late personnel switch with the play clock ticking down caused a delay of game penalty.
Rutgers ended up going for a field goal – and missed it.
“You know, once we didn’t have the right people on the field, we weren’t going to use the timeout at that point, take the field and I wasn’t certain,” Schiano said.
“I just felt like we needed to go for it and score there, but once we once we made an error in our in our substitution I wasn’t going to use the time out I was too close of a game and it was fourth-and-3, it wasn’t fourth-and-1.”