The strategy employed by the Ducks and coach Dan Lanning has been the talk of the college football world the past several days and even forced the hand of the NCAA, which issued a rule interpretation Wednesday that closed the loophole that Oregon exploited .
The decision from the Ducks’ coaching staff wasn’t just novel to the average football fan. It was to one of the greatest coaches in the modern history of the sport.
In an episode this week of The Triple Option , Fox Sports’ college football podcast, former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer expressed astonishment at the tactic — not just for being used, but being imagined in the first place.
“If that’s true (that it was intentional), then for 38 years of my career, I’ve been playing checkers,” Meyer said. “I’ll be honest: that’s never even crossed my mind…They’re 12 yards away from kicking the game-winning field goal and we’re going to give them five more yards? Someone says ‘Hey, run the 12-man play’ and I’m going ‘What in the…’”
As is painfully familiar to anyone in Ohio by now, Oregon had 12 players on the field while Ohio State threw an incomplete pass on a third-and-25 from the Ducks’ 43-yard line. Because it was a live-ball foul, the Buckeyes moved five yards up the field, but lost the four seconds it took for the play to be run, taking the clock from 10 seconds remaining to six.
Even with the penalty, Ohio State was still out of field goal range and on the ensuing play, Buckeyes quarterback Will Howard ran for a 12-yard gain, but after going to the ground, he was unable to call a timeout before the clock ran out and the game ended.
“If he slides that much quicker, they get the timeout and line up for a field goal and they leave Eugene, Oregon with one of the great wins for Ohio State,” Meyer said.
Under the NCAA’s new interpretation, if the defense is whistled for having 12 active players on the field during the final two minutes of either half, the offense can choose to have the game clock reset to the time that had been displayed at the previous snap, along with earning the five-yard penalty.
Meyer, who’s currently a college football analyst for Fox, acknowledged that he wasn’t “an extremist” when it came to preparing players for every possible game situation. Still, like any coach, he would have his players practice particular scenarios so that if they ever arose in a game, they’d know what to do and how to execute.
What happened with Oregon was something he have never thought to envision.
“You do spend every day in training camp, the last half of spring ball, every practice – I think everyone does this – finishing with some kind of scenario,” Meyer said. “I would keep track and I would actually had a staff analytics guy help me with that. ‘Hey, give me a situation, give me a situation, give me a situation.’ I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that one.”
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