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Dan Lanning and Oregon walked away with a massive win over Ohio State with the help of some inventive gamesmanship at the end of the showdown, and it took the NCAA less than a week to ensure the Ducks will be the last college football team to use that loophole to their advantage.
There wasn’t a single game on the college football schedule last weekend that was surrounded by more hype than the showdown between #2 Ohio State and #3 Oregon, and it’s pretty safe to say it lived up to expectations.
The Buckeyes had enough time to try to mount a comeback after their opponents took a 32-21 lead with a little less than two minutes to go in the fourth quarter, but they ultimately came up short thanks to a few clutch plays from the Ducks defense and some questionable decision-making by Ohio State QB Will Howard.
However, there wasn’t a single sequence that garnered more attention than the second-to-last play of the game with ten seconds left.
Ohio State lost four pretty valuable seconds on an incompletion before Oregon was hit with an illegal substitution penalty for having 12 men on the field. Some keen observers quickly speculated Ducks coach Dan Lanning had purposely sent out an extra defender knowing the five-yard penalty that would ensue was small potatoes compared to the time they’d be able to milk on a play where they’d have the edge on defense.
Lanning all but admitted that’s exactly what happened while speaking with the media on Monday, and the NCAA said it was taking a closer look at the rulebook to determine if something needs to change.
The vast majority of adjustments to officiating guidelines are instituted in the offseason, but we were treated to a fairly rare exception on Wednesday due to a new “interpretation” that makes Lanning’s strategy obsolete by resetting the clock back to the time at the previous snap if the extra player wasn’t attempting to get off of the field.
Here’s the new rules interpretation from the NCAA regarding the 12-men on the field penalty, closing the loophole that Oregon used to take a few seconds off the clock: pic.twitter.com/OdH7mMPL6L
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) October 16, 2024
It was fun while it lasted.