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Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Official’s call was correct, but it wasn’t right
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Pac-10 supervisor of officials said his guy got it right when he called an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Washington QB Jake Locker at the end of last Saturday’s game with BYU.
Based on my conversations with several people on Monday, I say this: The call was correct. But it certainly wasn’t right.
In case you missed it, here is what happened. Washington trailed 28-21 but Locker drove his team down the field and scored on a three-yard run with only two seconds left. Locker jumped off the turf, flipped the ball over his shoulder into the air, and started celebrating with his teammates.
Locker was called for a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Washington had to kick a 35-yard extra point that was blocked. BYU won 28-27.
Pac-10 referee Larry Farina said after the game that under the celebration rule, as written, that his crew was required to make the call. “It is not a judgment call,” he said. And the Pac-10 office backed him up.
So I called Rogers Redding, the SEC supervisor of officials, and Doug Rhoads, the ACC supervisor of officials, and asked them to help me understand this. It just didn’t make sense to me that an official would not have the discretion to keep a flag in his pocket in an end of the game situation like that.
There are two full pages in the rulebook on this. Rhoads read the whole thing to me. And the way the rule is written the official was supposed to call that penalty. There is a laundry list of specific acts in the rulebook and if the player commits any one of them, it’s 15-yards, period.
But that still doesn’t make it right.
Here is the problem that got us to this point. The excessive celebration rule was put in many years ago to clean up some of the excesses in player behavior: Simulated throat slashing, taunting, the real knucklehead stuff that has no place in the game.
But coaches and school officials were complaining that the rule was applied inconsistently from conference to conference. Based on my very unscientific observation, I found that to be true. What was an unsportsmanlike act in Baton Rouge might get overlooked in Boise.
So the NCAA football rules committee, which includes coaches, decided to simplify things and just list a bunch of those specific acts that would draw an automatic unsportsmanlike penalty. It is kind of like a zero tolerance policy. If a player commits one of these acts, you throw the flag, no questions asked.
And before the season started the various supervisors of officials made their stops and told coaches that player behavior and safety was going to be a point of emphasis for this season. When they say it is a point of emphasis, that means the officials are going to be looking for these kind of fouls and making sure they are called when committed.
So you ask, and logically so, why didn’t the official just say “To heck with the rule? I ain’t calling it because it takes the game away from the players.” For making that independent judgment that official could get downgraded in his evaluation and possibly lose his next assignment.
It could be that because of this one call and the uproar that it has created, this won’t be an issue for the rest of the season. You can bet that a lot of coaches have shown this film to their players this week and said: “Give the ball back to the official when you score. Gift wrap it and say “thank you” if necessary. Offer to buy him lunch. Ask about his family. Just don’t get a penalty that will get us beat.”
But the fact that it might not happen again misses the larger point. In my opinion there has to be a happy medium between officials having total discretion over when to call the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty and the rigid set of standards in the current rule. One of the things that makes college football a better game than the NFL is that the emotion is real and it’s spontaneous. There is a reason that the NFL is called the “No Fun League.” College football does a lot of things to imitate the NFL. It doesn’t want to do that.
The rules committee needs to go back to the table and address this. And here’s why: The game and the stories about the game should be about the players. The officials I know are hard-working guys who are really dedicated to being good at what they do. The last thing they want is to be a part of the game story. In this case, even though the rulebook was followed properly, the story was about the officials.
And that is not good for the game.
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