Sports
Oregon QB Slides To Give Himself Up, Defender Treats This As A Reasonable Time To Hit His Head
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
Dante Moore, the Oregon quarterback, did everything right. He tucked the ball, he went down feet-first, he made himself small, and a defender hit him in the head and neck anyway, because apparently the universal football signal for I am surrendering is open to interpretation.
The NCAA has a rule called targeting. It is not a new rule. It is not a complicated rule. It is, in fact, one of the few rules in college football written in plain English and aimed at exactly one thing, which is this thing, which happened, on camera, in front of officials holding yellow flags they did not throw.
College football targeting rules require ejection. They require a review. They require that someone, somewhere in a booth with a monitor and a headset, watch the play back and say yes, that was a head, and yes, that was contact, and yes, those two things meeting is the definition of the rule we wrote. This process exists. It did not produce the result it was designed to produce.
Oregon head coach Dan Lanning addressed the situation with the particular exhaustion of a man who has read the rulebook and is now being told the rulebook is more of a suggestion. "He was sliding. His feet were in front of him. That is the mechanism by which a player communicates that he is no longer a runner." Lanning then paused in the way a person pauses when they are deciding whether to continue being professional. He continued being professional.
The NCAA, for its part, has not commented, which is consistent with the NCAA's general approach to situations it caused.
What the sport has now, in the wake of this play, is a national conversation about targeting, which is the thing you get when the rule works on paper and the officials work in a different medium entirely. Analysts have spent several television hours explaining what a slide is, what it communicates, and why contact with the head of a man in a slide is illegal, as though this is new information and not the literal text of a rule that has been in the book since 2013.
Moore, who did not ask for any of this, is now the centerpiece of a debate about whether he slid clearly enough. This is the part where the sport takes a player who got hit illegally in the head and turns the camera around to examine his technique.
There is a version of this sport where a quarterback slides, the whistle blows, the flag comes out, the ejection happens, and everyone goes home having enforced a rule they all agreed to enforce. That version exists in the rulebook. The other version, the one where it is a judgment call whether a man's head is his head, is apparently what we are running instead.
The targeting rule has never been clearer. The targeting call has never been more absent. This is college football telling on itself with a full broadcast crew present and nobody even slightly embarrassed about it.
The story we are making fun of: https://frontofficesports.com/article/illegal-hit-oregon-qb-dante-moore-puts-ncaa-targeting-rules-into-focus/