Oregon Ducks working to correct "alarming" penalty issues

There aren’t many teams in the nation that are committing penalties at a higher rate than the No. 12 Oregon Ducks this season.

Through five games, the Ducks rank 115th out of 131 FBS teams with 72 penalty yards per game. The only Pac-12 program that has been penalized more frequently on a per-game basis in 2022 is Arizona State which, of course, recently parted ways with head coach Herm Edwards.

The last two games, in particular, have presented some glaring issues for the Ducks. They were penalized eight times for 87 yards in their Week 4 win over Washington State, and 14 times for 135 yards during last weekend’s win over Stanford.

The penalty yardage total was the most by an Oregon team in a single game since 2017.

“Extremely alarming and extremely concerning and we’re going to work on it,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said after the Stanford game when asked if the penalties are a concern. “It’s certainly a negative way to end. But it’s something we have to get better at and we’re not going to sit here and ignore it. We’ve got a lot to improve on.”

Throughout this week, Oregon has been putting systems in place in order to solve the issues.

Lanning said the team is taking accountability for its penalties during practice, and earlier this week, receiver Troy Franklin explained exactly what that means.

“So basically, we just have a new rule: anybody who is getting a pre-snap penalty, or a penalty during the game, they’re going to go out. … And have to do a certain amount of up-downs,” Franklin said.

So far, Franklin says, the accountability system has been effective.

“Most definitely — I think (on Tuesday) we didn’t have a penalty,” Franklin said. “Maybe we had one, but I didn’t really see any yellow flags out there.”

Oregon was hit with a flurry of pre-snap penalties against Stanford, including three false starts. Quarterback Bo Nix and center Alex Forsyth were seen voicing their frustrations with referees during the game as they believed some Cardinal defenders were mimicking Nix’s cadence.

After the game, Forsyth noted that those types of penalties stopped after he and Nix spoke with the referees.

“We can’t shoot ourselves in the foot and that starts with me, too,” Forsyth said after the game. “There’s some on the RPOs where we’re downfield and you’ve kind of got to live with those because that’s the run-pass option world there. But some of the pre-snap ones we got at the refs they were mimicking our cadence there for a little bit so had to deal with them on that.

“Once we got that taken care of they stopped making those calls.”

Whether or not Stanford’s players were intentionally mimicking Nix’s cadence, the senior quarterback said the penalties are simply inexcusable.

“It’s all about concentration. We know the cadence, so that’s not the issue,” Nix said on Tuesday “It’s about concentrating and locking in and making sure we’re focusing on that and not letting the outside noise affect us.”