Weekly Affirmation: College Football Rulebook

In the final 2012 edition of the Weekly Affirmation, it's worth looking at the on-field product of college football as it relates to the current version of the sport's rulebook. There's so much in this sport that needs to be fixed, but before any rewrites are made to the rules, the right conversation must unfold.

By Matthew Zemek
 
UNWRITTEN RULES, NOT-YET-WRITTEN RULES, AND A FOOL'S RULES: THE CHANGES COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S RULEBOOK NEEDS FOR 2013 AND BEYOND

Much was made last week about the fact that Alabama's Quinton Dial was not suspended for the BCS National Championship Game against Notre Dame for his hit on Georgia's Aaron Murray in the SEC Championship Game on Dec. 1. YouTube has all sorts of videos of the hit; you'll want to look for one with CBS's wider-angle shot so that you can see the follow-through of Dial's right arm, which was the lead instrument in dealing the blow to Murray's head. (It was not a helmet-to-helmet hit.) The play naturally stimulated much discussion in the college football community about favoritism to the SEC and/or Alabama, but the overlooked point about the hit – which clearly merited a 15-yard flag due to the fact that Murray's head was targeted – is that if it had not been directed to Murray's head, it would have been legal.

Maybe, you would quite reasonably argue, Dial's hit should not have been legal, but under the current rules of Division I (FBS) college football, the hit would have been legal if it had not targeted Murray's head.

Those who felt Dial should have been suspended for the BCS title game felt that Aaron Murray was a defenseless player. Let's see if that designation holds up under scrutiny. In Rule 2, Section 27, Article 14, the college football rulebook lists the following examples of a "Defenseless Player":

"a. A player in the act of or just after throwing a pass.

b. A receiver whose focus is on catching a pass.

c. A kicker in the act of or just after kicking a ball.

d. A kick returner whose focus is on catching or recovering a kick in the air.

e. A player on the ground at the end of a play.

f. A player obviously out of the play."

The only possible example that might describe Murray is example F, and even then, it's decidedly unclear if Murray meets the standard set forth in example F. What does it mean to be "obviously" out of a play? Dial hit Murray before Alabama's interception return ended. The ball, in other words, was still live. Murray was not running toward the play; he was jogging toward it. Instructively, though, he had not – in football parlance – "given himself up" or otherwise indicated that he wanted nothing to do with the play. Murray lightly jogged toward the play. He did demonstrate a clear intent to pursue the play, and as such, one can make a legitimate argument that he was fair game. Moreover, if the Alabama interceptor had made a cutback to his left – toward the middle third of the field – Murray would have been in the middle of the play.

All in all, it seems that by the standards advanced in the written rulebook – the one we have, NOT the one we wish to have or THINK we should have – Murray was not "obviously out of the play." The written rulebook, as it exists, did not protect Murray or indict Dial to the extent that a suspension was fully and truly warranted.

Let's carry this Dial-Murray discussion to its conclusion: If you still think the Dial hit merited a suspension, it's not as though you're thinking unreasonably or processing the situation with a deficient understanding of (or concern for) the quality of the sport of college football. You're actually thinking and acting in accordance with an appropriate emphasis on player safety. That's definitely where the sport should focus as it evolves and tries to improve its product… not just for fans, but for the players who put their bodies on the line every Saturday for our entertainment.

To be clear, the Weekly Affirmation agrees that quarterbacks, if not making a vigorous and substantial effort to make a tackle on a fumble or interception return, should be protected from the kind of hit Quinton Dial delivered on Dec. 1. However, what fans and commentators so often miss in these types of discussions is that the college football rulebook often fails to give sufficient protection – or opportunity for the redress of wrongs – to players and teams. The rulebook should have protected Murray, but as presently constructed, it did not.

Fans and commentators upset with the lack of a suspension for Dial made their claims because they felt that quarterbacks (and probably placekickers) shouldn't be held to the same standard of other position players. If that statement isn't entirely accurate, or if it doesn't cover the full range of critics in this case, let's cover the rest of this subgroup with the following add-on statement: Those who were upset with the lack of a suspension for Dial were certainly responding to the fact that Murray wasn't traveling anywhere close to full speed at the time Dial hit him.

Those who were outraged by the lack of a suspension for Dial were, in sum, responding to what they perceived to be an "unwritten rule" of football: You don't target quarterbacks on fumble or interception returns, especially if they're not going all-out in the attempt to make a tackle. That sentiment and the purpose behind it are both noble and very much worth fighting for. HOWEVER… there's a reason why a rulebook exists: to write down the rules of the sport. If you keep score and mark boundaries and install all sorts of regulations, you are setting down a structure within which your sport is supposed to be played. Yogi Berra would approve of the following statement: "If you don't write down a rule, nobody will follow it."

Instead of complaining about the lack of a suspension for Quinton Dial, college football fans and – especially – commentators with a microphone should be emphasizing the need to make an addendum to Rule 2, Section 27, Article 14. This addendum, not currently on the books, could state the following: "A defenseless player shall also include quarterbacks and placekickers who, by making a minimal or token effort to pursue plays, are vulnerable to substantial physical harm. If a quarterback or placekicker makes what is viewed as a vigorous and substantial physical effort to involve himself in a play, he is not defenseless. If a player is walking or slowly jogging, he is not making a vigorous and substantial effort to involve himself in a play and should accordingly be seen as defenseless by an opposing player. Open-field hits on defenseless quarterbacks and placekickers, according to these standards, merit automatic game ejections and automatic one-game suspensions for a team's next contest."

See, critics of the non-suspension for Dial? That's how you enshrine proper protections into the rulebook. That's how you defend and advance your values as they relate to college football. That's how the Dial-Murray incident can be helpful and positive for the sport. That's how college football should move – and be moved – forward.

Moving beyond L'Affaire Dial-Murray, let's continue the final Weekly Affirmation of the season by emphasizing the need for the sport to revise its rulebook on a whole host of plays, keeping in mind that the structure of the rules matters far more than whether officials get calls right on the field in real time. If systems and structures enable incorrect on-field calls to be revised or overturned in some way, the on-field product of college football will improve by leaps and bounds.

College football's rule structure cries out for several urgent reforms in 2013 and beyond. One of the two or three biggest reforms is for pass interference to become a reviewable play. Let's amplify this point to no end, so that power brokers and rules custodians in the sport might finally see the light: College football has to ensure that mechanisms exist for the redress of wrongs when refs – who have very difficult jobs in high-pressure situations, overseeing a high-velocity, full-contact sport – do not make the proper calls.

Let's make an important distinction here: The culture of college football, as created by fans and paid commentators alike, has to be able to affirm and support referees while improving the architecture of the rule structure. The college football community must not regard a majority of incorrect on-field calls as grievous errors. Deficient game administration and improper officiating procedures are unacceptable, and a few blown calls – when occurring right in front of an official's line of sight – will rightly merit sharp criticism from fans and pundits. However, the speed and violence of football make it very hard for referees to make calls in real time. On-field errors, for the most part, should not be viewed so negatively by fans and commentators.

There's a big "but" here, however…

What officials have to realize (this is also true for the subset of fans that thinks commentators are too hard on officials…) is that the anger which pours forth from officiating critics is often a product of the fact that college football's rule structure (the written rulebook combined with policies for adjudication of plays) does not offer a backup plan. The combination of game rules and officiating policies does not provide, in many instances, a contingency that allows for on-field calls to be corrected. If college football's rules committee – culturally and procedurally – can come to grips with this fundamental overarching reality, so much of the vitriol currently hurled at referees would vanish in an instant. Blown calls in real time wouldn't matter if replay booths regularly made proper overturns. (The Atlantic Coast Conference's track record of replay booth performance this year, especially in the Virginia Tech-Clemson game, was abysmal.) More to the point, blown calls wouldn't matter if those same replay booths (staffed by people who can see, which is plainly not the case in much of the ACC…) were allowed by the rule structure to review more plays in the first place.

When fans argue about a bad pass interference call in the latter stages of a close game – we saw this in the South Carolina-Vanderbilt opener and on several other occasions in 2012 – they miss the larger point that pass interference is not currently allowed to be reviewed by replay. Forget the questionable call made by referees on the field; if replay review was more expansive and the structure of oversight was more substantial, fewer bad calls would affect game outcomes.

What applies to pass interference also applies to offside penalties and holding penalties. It is absurd that, at the very least, coaches cannot challenge a penalty call (or non-call) in various situations that can and do (and will) impact the outcomes of drives and – by extension – games. Let the point stick in your mind, and let it give you the willingness to send a message to members of college football's rules committee (or to a person with a media megaphone who can deliver the message with more influence): Blown on-field calls are okay… as long as they can be corrected by the rule structure as set down in the written rulebook and as governed by game administration policies.

(Side note: Administration of additional replay reviews really shouldn't be a sticking point for fans and those who consider themselves advocates of the sport. The current system of replay review is undeniably clunky and inefficient. A simple metric can and should be established for effective replay review: The booth must acquire the full range of available camera angles from the broadcast feed. When all those angles are gathered, the on-field official should make an announcement to that effect. After 90 seconds, a ruling must be made, and naturally, if the booth reviewer isn't convinced that an overturn is in order, the ruling on the field must stand. Do review procedures have to be any more complicated than that?)

In conclusion, there's one final point that needs to be made about the college football rulebook and the kind of sport we want to have: The rules need to point to a clear and consistent set of values, and if uncertainty prevails, college football's rules committee should conduct public discussions that openly explore what "real football" can and should mean in living color.

One of the most momentous occasions in the life and history of college football's rulebook was the Florida-Tennessee game from the 2000 season. It was in that game that Florida receiver Jabar Gaffney caught a touchdown pass in the closing seconds to beat Tennessee, 27-23. A great hue and cry were raised about the legitimacy of Gaffney's catch, but right or wrong, that play changed the way college football catches were perceived and, ultimately, interpreted by on-field officials.

In the year 2000, the rule about getting one foot down in bounds – still viewed by some as college football's standard for a legal pass reception – was exactly that. However, Gaffney's catch led college football's rule-making community to insist that more had to be done to secure a catch. By the middle of the decade, especially 2006 (a disallowed LSU catch in its 7-3 loss at Auburn illustrated this trend…), you could see the sport tightening its standards on legal catches. In more recent years, this notion of "completing a reception" – the college football cousin of the NFL's "process of a catch" – became much more prominent in the sport's rulebook. A steady progression toward more incomplete-pass rulings washed over the sport.

To illustrate this point in greater fullness, let's recall the disallowance of an interception by Oregon cornerback Cliff Harris in the 2011 BCS National Championship Game against Auburn. Harris's elbow clearly hit in bounds before any other body part, thereby satisfying the requirements for what should have been a legal catch. However, his bobble of the ball after hitting the ground gave officials the leeway to rule an incomplete pass. In the year 2000, under Jabar Gaffney catch standards, you would not have seen Harris's interception disallowed on a regular basis. Today, that "incomplete" ruling is the rule more than the exception.

What you have seen in the past 12 years of a post-Jabar Gaffney college football world – especially since 2006 – is the effect of the rule-making community's emphasis on one tiny portion of the rulebook. On the topic of completed passes (legal catch receptions), Rule 2, Section 4, Article 4, statement F says the following: "When in question, the catch, recovery or interception is not completed." That overly broad statement has been allowed to serve as the gateway to a preponderance of incomplete-pass rulings that simply did not exist in a pre-Jabar Gaffney context. (For an NFL point of comparison, recall Butch Johnson's touchdown catch for the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl XII in 1978. That's a more distant example of a legitimate catch, made in the end zone, that current football points of emphasis, pro or college, simply do not and would not tolerate.)

Maybe you're the kind of person who loves defense and therefore likes these new points of emphasis from the rule-making community, applied on the field by officials. Maybe you're like the Weekly Affirmation and think these rules to be awful. Regardless of your stance, what is undeniable is that this shift in emphasis creates a different kind of sport. When legal receptions are simply a matter of getting feet down in bounds, more fumbles are likely to occur after subsequent hits. When legal receptions require "the completion of a reception" and a "football move," fewer post-hit fumbles will occur. One set of emphases over here creates a higher-risk, higher-reward version of football, while the other one creates a lower-risk, lower-reward version of the sport. Good or bad, right or wrong, the rule-making community in college football owes it to coaches, players and fans to be public, transparent and accountable in saying, "This is what we think football should be. Do you, coaches/players/fans, think this is the right direction for the sport to take? Moreover, how can we be more consistent in creating the same product in and through our rulebook?"

On this larger notion of creating a "consistent product" in and through the rulebook, let's briefly switch from legal catch rules and move to fumble rules, especially those pertaining to fumbles in end zones.

When one realizes that college football's end-zone-based fumble rules are high-risk for the offense in the opponent's end zone (a touchback if the fumble is not recovered by the defense and goes out of the end zone) but low-risk for the offense in its own end zone (you can fumble into or out of your own end zone on a kickoff or punt, as shown in the Cincinnati-Louisville game, and not be hit with a safety), it's plain that the sport's rules are inconsistent. This is just one example among dozens.

It therefore stands to reason that if college football is going to make legal pass receptions a low-risk, low-reward proposition for receivers – making it hard for them to fumble but also hard for them to make catches – the sport should also enable pass catchers to get up after kneeling on the ground without being touched by an opposing defender. Current rules requiring the avoidance of knee contact with the ground in order to remain in a live-ball position make the advancement of the ball a high-risk, high-reward activity.

I've spent 3,000 words on this season-ending edition of the Weekly Affirmation. I could go on for another 15,000 words and not run out of meaningful rules discussions.

The point is clear, as the 2012 regular season begins to recede from view and 2013 appears on the not-too-distant horizon: College football's rulebook needs to be changed in so many different ways. More specifically, the rule structure of the sport – the policies that govern the enforcement and review of rules – has to be tweaked to allow for the sufficient redress of wrongs. Guiding all of these efforts requires leadership, which – in turn – makes it essential for members of the rule-making community to be open and accountable in leading mature discussions about the identity of football and what this sport should look like on the playing field. This is the vision the sport needs to acquire in 2013 and beyond.

We'll see you next season at the Weekly Affirmation.