James Franklin calls Peach Bowl officiating 'less than desirable'

Following a disappointing end to the season, a 38-25 loss to Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl, Penn State head coach James Franklin wasn’t shy to let some criticism fly in his postgame press conference. And that included some heat for the officials.

While he ultimately stopped himself from spinning off into a long rant, it was clear Franklin didn’t like some of the calls — or no calls — on Saturday afternoon in Atlanta. He pointed to one sequence very early in the game where Penn State settled for a field goal instead of taking the lead on a touchdown.

“I won’t get into all the details. I thought the officiating was less than desirable. That first drive, we have the field goal, we run a slant, we get turned around, but I’ll move on. I could list out a number of examples. That’s a big play in that game at a critical moment, starting out with a touchdown rather than a field goal is significant. But I’ll move on,” Franklin said.

Franklin also explained that the changes at both offensive and defensive coordinator in the last few months have made things difficult for Penn State.

“Specifically to the game, just too many moving parts with the staff and with the players against a good team. Too many moving parts, staff and players, to have the type of success that we wanted to have today,” Franklin said.

A supposed Penn State burner social media account was revealed to be an Ole Miss staffer

Friday night, a tweet from an apparent Penn State fan account made its way across social media. It included a fake quote from Nittany Lions defender Kobe King, and in true college football fashion, fans dug deeper and found an apparent connection to an Ole Miss staffer ahead of the Peach Bowl.

At first, it seemed like an old fashioned college football conspiracy theory. That is, until Lane Kiffin’s postgame press conference after Ole Miss defeated Penn State in the game.

Kiffin confirmed the account was created by Fisher Ray. He found out about it Friday night, and he laughed at the situation, especially when Penn State fans decided to find out more about it.

“I was made aware of that,” Kiffin said. “I’m glad we won so you wouldn’t be bringing that up in the press conference and they’d be saying that motivated them. I thought it was pretty funny actually because they discovered that it was Fisher Ray, one of our assistants, one of our student assistants. So Fisher is now kind of famous.

“But I thought it was really cool last night when he showed it to me, he’s like, these Penn State fans now, they’re into this. They researched his password and e-mail and were able to figure out which guy it was that started it. It was all in good fun. I hope the fans had fun with it.”

As for whether he approved of the account, Kiffin offered a quick response.

“I’m not going to start making social media rules on people,” he said.

On3’s Nick Schultz contributed to this report