I don’t talk about penalties in this column often. In fact, most penalties get filtered out of these analyses, as we’re trying to talk about real performance on real plays, without the spotty noise you get from, say an iffy PI penalty that results in a 15-yard gain (what would normally be called “an explosive play”). It’s just hard to net out what these penalties mean about an offense’s performance, from an efficiency/explosiveness perspective.
But there were a lot of penalties on Saturday, especially for the Tide, including some game-wrenching ones that you have to question (speaking of iffy Pass Interference calls).