How The NCAA May Close Dan Lanning’s 12-Man Loophole

Three days after Oregon head coach Dan Lanning found a loophole in the rules to trade a five-yard penalty for four seconds of game time, the NCAA is now looking at ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

A report from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo cited Steve Shaw, the NCAA secretary rules editor, and reported that that the NCAA Football Playing Rules Committee is looking at issuing updated guidance on how to handle that situation, if it arises again.

According to the report, the Big Ten officiating crew enforced the penalty correctly as the rules are currently written. It is spelled out in Section 5 of the NCAA football rulebook, covering substitutions. The relevant section is included as a screenshot below.

With 10 seconds left on the game clock, the Ducks appeared to intentionally add a 12th player to the field just before the snap. Monday, during an interview, Lanning seemed to admit that it was an intentional act.

“We spend an inordinate amount of time on situations, and there are some situations that don’t show up very often in college football,” he said, “but this is one that obviously we have worked on. So you can see the result.”

The result of the play was an incomplete pass, which took the clock down from 10 seconds to 6 seconds, and while it resulted in a five-yard penalty, that was a trade the Ducks were willing to make, with the Buckeyes still outside of field goal range.

If the NCAA rules committee decides to act, it could issue an interpretation bulletin to officials instructing them to enforce a penalty differently. One possible solution would be to enforce the five-yard penalty, but to return the game clock to where it was at the time of the snap.

Jon Wilner, who covers the historic Pac-12 schools, suggested a different possible solution on Twitter.

Whatever the NCAA decides to do, it won’t impact the end of Saturday night’s game between the Ducks and Buckeyes, but it could change how such games are handled in the future.

Go to discussion...