The NCAA has officially changed the rule that allowed Oregon head coach Dan Lanning to put 12 men on the field against Ohio State late in the fourth quarter, helping the Ducks run the clock down an extra few seconds.
“After the two-minute timeout in either half, if the defense commits a substitution foul and 12 or more players are on the field and participate in a down, officials will penalize the defense for the foul and at the option of the offended team, reset the game clock back to the time displayed at the snap,” the rules memo from the NCAA said. “The game clock will then restart on the next snap. If the 12th defender was attempting to exit but was still on the field at the snap and had no influence on the play, then the normal substitution penalty would be enforced with no clock adjustment.”
Now when a team commits a substitution foul inside the final two minutes of either half, the clock will reset to how much time was left before the play began.
In the Week 7 loss to Oregon, the clock ran down from 10 seconds to six seconds remaining, and the Buckeyes only gained 5 yards due to the penalty that made it tougher to find an open man downfield, which Lanning implied he did on purpose on Monday.
“There was a timeout before that — we spend an inordinate amount of time on situations,” Lanning said. “There’s some situations that don’t show up very often in college football but this is one that obviously was something we had worked on. So you can see the result.”
This comes soon after it was reported by Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger that the NCAA was considering a rule change due to the situation in the Oregon, Ohio State game.
