Big Ten football: Jim Harbaugh dismisses James Franklin's tunnel 'whining'

By Michael Cohen
FOX Sports College Football Writer

Landslide blowouts of Iowa and Minnesota by Ohio State and Penn State, respectively, meant the five Big Ten matchups on last week’s college football calendar were decided by an average of 19.3 points per game.

But the lopsided on-field product in Week 8 still produced a treasure trove of interesting storylines that stretched beyond the Midwest and into the national purview:

• Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz faced pointed questions about nepotism following another offensive stinker authored by his son, Brian Ferentz, who serves as the team’s offensive coordinator.
• Ohio State standout Jaxon Smith-Njigba returned from a hamstring injury only to depart in the first half after he appeared to tweak something in his lower body.
• Rutgers snapped a 21-game home losing streak in Big Ten play.
• Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford silenced his critics by throwing for 295 yards and four touchdowns against the Golden Gophers.

In other words, there’s never a dull week in the Big Ten regardless of whether the games are thrillers. Here are some storylines to watch as another weekend approaches:

Tit for tat

Context: Last week, cell phone cameras captured a halftime shouting match between players from Michigan and Penn State in the tunnel at Michigan Stadium. The videos spread quickly on social media as discussion about the confrontation spilled into the next few days. When asked about the kerfuffle, Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin suggested a policy be enacted to prevent two teams from entering the tunnel at the same time. 

On Monday, Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh was asked about Franklin’s comments.

Quote: "I really got bigger fish to fry than Coach Franklin’s opinion on the halftime tunnel from a game ago," Harbaugh said in his Monday news conference. "All they gotta do is walk into their locker room. I think you saw pretty clearly that they completely stopped. They weren’t letting us get up the tunnel. And it just seemed like such a sophomoric ploy to try to keep us out of our locker room, and he looked like he was the ringleader of the whole thing. But no, I’ve got bigger fish to fry than to worry about that kind of whining."

Analysis: Over the years, upgrades and renovations at Michigan Stadium have added new luxury suites, updated the scoreboards and overhauled the press box as a building that opened in 1927 showed its age. Spared from those modernizations was the tunnel used by both the Wolverines and their opponents to access the field. 

It remains a kind of rugged, gritty, unrefined relic to Michigan football's tradition. But it’s also the only tunnel connecting the locker rooms to the field, and the small space gets cramped when both teams pile in at halftime. Last week’s bottleneck spawned a shouting match that turned physical when someone on the Penn State side hurled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the Michigan crowd, according to a tweet from Michigan director of football nutrition Abigail O’Connor.

"The one tunnel is a problem," Franklin said in his weekly news conference a few days after the game. "And to me, we need to put a policy in place from a conference perspective that’s going to stop these (issues). We’re not the first team to kind of get into a jawing match in the tunnel. For me, I want to focus on getting my team in the locker room — not jawing back and forth. I want my team to get in the locker room and their team to get in the locker room.

"There really should be a policy that the first team that goes in, there’s a buffer. Because if not, this team starts talking, and they start jawing back and forth, and what’s going to happen is something bad is going to happen before we put in the policy. And all there’s gotta be is a two-minute or minute buffer in between the two teams. This team is in before that team gets close, and however we want to do. But we’re not the first team that’s had issues like that. And to me, under the current structure, we won’t be the last."

A few days before the dustup, Harbaugh vocalized his adoration for the tunnel and said he’s glad it’s remained unchanged over time. Michigan dedicated the tunnel to former head coach Lloyd Carr on the same day as the scuffle with Penn State. It’s now known as the Lloyd Carr Tunnel at Michigan Stadium.

Pulling the plug

Context: Earlier this month, Rutgers entered its bye week ranked outside the top 120 in both scoring offense (19.7 points per game) and total offense (311.2 yards per game) through its first six games. The performance was poor enough for head coach Greg Schiano to fire offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson, who had been in the role since 2020, and give tight ends coach Nunzio Campanile the interim title. With two weeks of practice to adjust, the Scarlet Knights knocked off Indiana in their first game without Gleeson and earned their first Big Ten win of the season.

Quote: "Look, I thought we prepared very hard over the two weeks," Schiano said in his Monday news conference. "Certainly you can’t flip things upside down in two weeks’ time. So I think what we’ll do is continue to grow. The quarterback position, you know, it’s not like we discovered something. We finally had our quarterbacks all able to play on the same day."

Analysis: No team in the Big Ten has been more unsettled at quarterback this season than Rutgers. A heated training camp battle between sophomore Evan Simon, graduate student Noah Vedral and sophomore Gavin Wimsatt spilled into the regular season. Each player has made at least one start, and nobody has started more than three games. The trio has combined for six passing touchdowns and eight interceptions, though six of those INTs belong to Simon.

Schiano and his coaching staff leaned on Vedral the last three weeks to bridge the bye and run the offense following the change at coordinator. The 24-year-old QB began his collegiate career at Central Florida in 2017. He spent two years at Nebraska (2018-19) before finally landing at Rutgers in 2020 and keeping the starting job most of the last two seasons.

Vedral was neither spectacular nor overly efficient in Saturday’s 24-17 win over Indiana, completing 12 of 24 passes for just 113 yards and a touchdown. But he navigated four quarters without turning the ball over and helped Rutgers convert seven times on third and fourth down combined.

"We didn’t know exactly how it was going to go," Schiano said. "I mean, for that game, Noah was the starter, Gavin was the backup and Evan was the next guy in. Each game is going to be different depending on our preparation, our opponent, our matchup. And until we figure out exactly how we want to go — and you can say, ‘Well, you’re on your eighth game.’ Yeah. As I told you at the beginning of the year, if (the quarterback situation) works itself out, that’s great. And if it doesn’t, we have to keep tweaking it until we figure it out. So we’re working on it."

Statistical anomaly

Context: Minnesota traveled to Penn State last weekend believing it had one of the best defenses in college football. The Gophers ranked sixth in the country by surrendering just 263.7 yards per game and ranked fourth in scoring defense (11.7 points per game), fifth in passing defense (159.2 yards per game) and 20th in rushing defense (104.5 yards per game). Then the Nittany Lions shredded them for 479 yards and 45 points during a prime-time, nationally televised beatdown in which Clifford was never sacked and rarely bothered.

Quote: "It’s not very good," Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck said Monday when asked about his team’s pass rush. "I can get into it a little bit more. We’re just not getting home with four (rushers). We’ve got guys to be able to step up and do better at it (with) technique, fundamentals. When we do (those things), we did get some pressure on (Clifford). He was able to step up in the pocket and make a big throw here or there. I know we even got some internal pressure, which was good. But we’ve gotta be better in that department. We know that. Whether that’s personnel, whether that’s bringing more people, whether that’s our fundamentals — it all has to improve."

Analysis: Despite how highly ranked defensive coordinator Joe Rossi’s unit was in several important categories before the game against Penn State, there were glaring weaknesses in the team’s pass-rushing statistics that had yet to burn the Gophers.

Through seven games, Minnesota ranks last in the Big Ten and tied for 118th nationally in sacks, with nine — a far cry from the 24 sacks accumulated by league-leaders Michigan. The only Gopher with double-digit quarterback pressures this season is edge rusher Jah Joyner, whose modest total of 11 is outside the top 200 players in the country and tied for 40th in the conference, according to Pro Football Focus. Six of his 11 pressures came in non-conference games against Western Illinois (three) and Colorado (three).

The Gophers’ diminutive pressure numbers are compounded by Minnesota’s inability to finish plays with sacks on the rare occasions they harass opposing quarterbacks. Edge rusher Danny Striggow is the only player with multiple sacks this season (three), but only one of them came against a Big Ten opponent. As a team, the Gophers have failed to tally a sack in each of their last two games.

The defensive numbers will continue to slip until Rossi generates a more consistent pass rush.

Read more:

• Check out the latest Big Ten Power Rankings
• Ohio State (with defense!) is now a clear No. 1
• ‘They’re buying in': This defense is why Ohio State hired Jim Knowles
• Bo Nix continues to re-write his story, leading Oregon past UCLA
• Three takeaways from Ohio State's win over Iowa
• Heisman Watch: Are Stroud, Hooker entering a two-man race?

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him on Twitter at @Michael_Cohen13.