Penn State football’s mid-season skid grew to three games after a 31-23 White Out loss to No. 19 USC on Saturday night.

The Trojans’ trip to Happy Valley for the iconic White Out was widely viewed as the biggest game on Penn State’s 2026 slate, and while the Nittany Lions played better than in recent weeks, it wasn’t enough to earn their first conference win and defend home turf.

Frustratingly, Matt Campbell was hired to give the blue and white an advantage in these kinds of “big” games, but the 46-year-old has struggled to manage them so far.

Penn State got checkmated three times on Saturday night. At the 8:55 mark of the first quarter, USC noticed the Nittany Lions made a late substitution, prompting the Trojans to substitute a defender off comically slowly to exploit the NCAA’s player substitution rule.

Essentially, if an offense substitutes, officials will hold the snap so the defense can send in its own players. The offense cannot snap until the officials release their hold on the game.

To avoid a penalty, Campbell had to burn a timeout just six minutes into the game.

“There were a couple of goofy moments in the game. I think the first one in the first half with the timeout situation, we didn’t get great clarity,” Campbell said postgame.

From his perspective, he claims the official held the snap while the 25-second play clock began counting down without warning.

Campbell opted for an extremely early timeout rather than take a five-yard penalty on 2nd-and-8.

“That’s on us for just being able to sub in and sub out different personnel, and they did a good job of doing that and keeping it slow, letting the clock run down,” Rocco Becht said postgame. “We got to be better in that area, but yeah, that was good by them.”

The phenomenon happened again with 4:11 left in the third quarter, as Campbell signaled for a timeout after USC’s slow-motion substitution following a late Penn State player swap.

However, he owned up to this particular mistake, despite the vagueness.

“I forget exactly what the other one was in the second half, where we ended up taking a timeout. I think it was a substitution situation where that was on the coaching piece of it. That was a substitution error,” Campbell said.

Even more bizarrely, Campbell called another timeout with 4:26 left in the fourth quarter after the blue and white were caught in an 11-on-10 man disadvantage.

After Jayden Maiava failed to connect with Trent Mosley downfield on third down, USC faced a 4th-and-4 on its own 13-yard line.

Ordinarily, Lincoln Riley would never go for it that deep in his own territory while up by a score. Penn State’s staff assumed the Trojans wouldn’t even try, so they sent punt returner Zay Robinson back deep, only to be shocked when Maiava lined up in shotgun and threatened to go for it, attacking a Penn State defense with a receiver who was unknowingly playing 60 yards deep as a safety.

Obviously, Campbell used his last remaining timeout to realign the fourth-down package.

“We kind of had our punt safe group out. They kept the offense out there, and I just didn’t want to screw around with it,” Campbell said. “I wanted to make sure we secured the football if we had the opportunity to do it at the end of the football game.”

Using one timeout to avoid a penalty is not a big deal. But burning three in one game because the opposing coaching staff outleveraged you simply by substituting personnel is inexcusable.

If those substitutions had been managed properly, Penn State could have stopped the clock a few times after USC took possession with 3:59 left and potentially gotten the ball back to Becht and the offense for a game-tying drive.

The most worrisome part is that this trend has existed since Penn State’s dumbfounding loss to Wisconsin, in which the Nittany Lions blew a 17-0 lead.

Campbell drew heavy scrutiny for comments he made after the Week 4 loss.

Digging deeper, Penn State took a lengthy television break to decide whether to go for it on 4th-and-1 from its own 38-yard line to open the fourth quarter. The offense then came out to go for it but ultimately used one of its own timeouts to punt, sending the ball back to the Badgers.

The Nittany Lions had a chance to win, possessing the ball with 1:13 left. Who knows what an extra timeout could have done for a crunch-time drive?

Among Penn State’s more obvious flaws that seemingly stem from player execution, wasting game-management resources has been a major deficiency in Campbell’s early career in Happy Valley.