During Saturday’s college game mistakes were made by some players and by the officials. The game ended 38-0, so we did not influence the outcome of the game. But mistakes are mistakes.
Out You Go
One thing I did not make a mistake on was ejecting two players for throwing punches. One guy in the 2nd quarter and the other guy in the 3rd quarter. The coach for the 2nd guy (the visitors) said he was going to protest my flag. Which apparently he did, since I got a call from the Commissioner Sunday morning asking for my view of what happened. He said he was watching the film and it got cutoff before he could see anything. I explained what I saw and why I threw the flag. Now, whatever happens to this play is whatever happens. Out of my hands. But if my ruling stands, this player cannot play the during the game next week.
What I am finding is most coaches are being very good about controlling players. When I throw flags now players begin to panic. They tell me if the flag is on them the coach will make them run sprints or some other form of punishment. I love that. Other coaches don’t seem to care. We are still throwing too many flag for Unsportsmanlike conduct, and I have had to DQ three players in the last 2 weeks, but things do seem to be getting a little better.
Inappropriate Touching
Our crew made a mistake related to an illegal touching foul. The root cause of this mistake was poor communication. Here is what happened. The Side Judge reported the foul as Illegal Touching. He was correct. The rule for this is found at 7-3-4 “No eligible offensive receiver who goes out of bounds during a down shall touch a legal forward pass the field of play or end zone or while airborne until it has been touched by an opponent or an official”. Simple. If a receiver steps out of bounds, comes back on the field and touches the ball, it’s a foul. The player became ineligible (remember this) by stepping out of bounds. But, what makes this kinda odd is the penalty is -- loss of down from the previous spot. No yardage. Not much of a penalty. So this becomes, in essence, simply an incomplete pass. BUT, after a moment, the Side Judge provided some additional information.
The receiver did step out of bounds and touch the ball…. BUT before that, this player was a covered receiver who went downfield. Hmmm. This makes him an Ineligible Receiver Downfield, which is a 5-yard penalty from the previous spot. If accepted, the down would be repeated. But, before we uncover (pun intended) this quandary, let’s first review what it means to be a covered receiver.
To understand being covered you first need an understanding of what it means to be an eligible receiver. Rule 7-3-3-a says, “Each player who is in an end position on his scrimmage line and who is wearing a number other than 50 through 79.” So to be ‘covered’ means an eligible receiver by number, say #40, has another player further down (wider) on the line of scrimmage. In other words, #40 is not the LAST player (in an end position) on the line of scrimmage. There is another player is the last one on the line of scrimmage and thus #40 is ‘covered’. This makes him, if you are following this, an ineligible receiver by position. If he goes downfield and there is a legal pass downfield, we have a foul.
BUT wait… there’s more. Rule 7-3-11 says “No originally ineligible player while inbounds shall intentionally touch a legal forward pass until it touched an opponent or an official”. This is also a foul for Illegal Touching. But, the penalty for this flavor of illegal touching is 5-yards from the previous spot…. No loss of down.
So, what the heck do we have here? Here is what I think. We obviously have Ineligible Receiver Downfield once the ball is airborne. There should be a flag. Then, once the player touches the ball we have a flag for illegal touching and the Ineligible Downfield goes away. I think the defense has an option to take either the loss of down, or the 5-yard version of Illegal Touching.
I originally walked off the 5-yards because typically the penalty is called on a lineman who touched the ball (the rule 7-3-11 flavor). I brought the ball back and we eventually applied the loss of down Illegal Touching. But really, we should have given the defensive captain the option.
Either way we looked like we didn’t know what we were doing. Because we didn’t.
