By his own admission, Oregon coach Dan Lanning and the rest of his staff — currently at 30 and counting — spend “an inordinate amount of time” exploring all kinds of potential situations that may pop up during a game. Some happen. Some don't.
Some get saved for a rainy day. And sometimes, that rainy day arrives in the final seconds of a showdown with another top-five team, as it did last Saturday against Ohio State. Did Lanning explicitly order a 12th player — one too many than the rules allow — onto the field just before Ohio State snapped the ball with 10 seconds to go? Lanning won't say.
Not in so many words anyway. "This was obviously something we had worked on,” Lanning said Monday. “You can see the result.
” So could everybody else, including Steve Shaw, the NCAA's national coordinator of football officials. By the time the final sequence ending with the Buckeyes running out of time in a 32-31 loss went viral — and long before Lanning offered essentially a non-denial denial about exploiting a loophole, Shaw and his team were already working on closing it. By Wednesday, the rules committee had issued a new interpretation , one that allows the game clock to be reset back to the time displayed at the snap when a defensive team commits an illegal substitution penalty.
The interpretation was the fourth in-season update issued by Shaw this year, which he jokingly called a “world record” during his tenure that began in 2020. Most pass without notice. Thi.