"Celebration"

Celebrate Good Times, Come On!!
“Celebration” - Kool & The Gang - 1979
The View from the Middle

This last Saturday night I was watching the Auburn Tigers play the Oregon Ducks in the most important college football game of the day. Oregon was ranked #11 in the country and Auburn was ranked #16. It was a big enough game to be played at a neutral site, Cowboys Stadium in Texas, and at prime time Saturday night. I was expecting a good game and hoping for an Auburn win, and in the end I wasn’t disappointed.

Auburn was starting a true Freshman quarterback and got behind quickly. Oregon was leading at halftime 14-3, and things were looking even worse early in the third quarter when Oregon went up 21-6. But I’ve known Auburn head coach, Gus Malzahn, since 1996 when he was hired as head coach at Shiloh High School here in Arkansas, and I’ve learned to never give up on Gus. He has figured out how to win at every level and under some unbelievable circumstances. He won two state championships with Shiloh and one at Springdale High School in 2005 when many argued that the Bulldogs were the best high school team in the country. Since going to Auburn, Gus is 63-30 in the brutal Western Division of the SEC which includes Alabama, LSU and Texas A&M. I firmly believe that Malzahn will win a national championship at Auburn someday.

And Gus and the Tigers did not disappoint Saturday night. Auburn clawed their way back and shut out the Ducks for the last 24 minutes of the game. And while the defense was blanking the Ducks, the offense was scoring the last 21 consecutive points to put the Tigers up 27 to 21. This is where the problem actually started for me.

The final play of the game for Auburn was a 26 yard touchdown pass from Freshman QB, Bo Nix, to Sophomore wide receiver Seth Williams with just nine seconds to play. This was probably the biggest play in Seth’s young life and as you might imagine, he was excited and he threw the ball down in celebration. Not a windmill spike where the ball bounced twenty feet in the air or even an taunting ball spin followed by Michael Jackson like dance moves. Just a simple toss of the ball down to the ground, for which he and the Tigers were accessed a 15 yard penalty. Really? 15 yards for that?

Let me explain the implications and make some comparisons. First, this meant that Auburn would have to kick off from their own 20 yard line instead of the 35 which is normal. This makes a kickoff for a touchback an impossibility and almost guarantees good field position for the team returning that kickoff. Even an average kickoff return would have given Oregon at least one good shot at the end zone. In this case, Oregon returned the kickoff all the way to the Auburn 35 which gave them a pretty reasonable shot at a last second touchdown. That’s 40 yards closer than a touchback which would have placed the ball on Oregon’s 25.

Did Seth Williams or Auburn really deserve that kind of penalty for a simple celebration like this? Does the punishment fit the crime? Most other 15 yard penalties like spearing, targeting, roughing the passer or throwing a chop block are intended to protect players from serious injury. Does tossing the ball to the ground after an amazing touchdown really belong in the same category as these fouls. Does it even deserve to be penalized at all.

These days it seems like every sack of the quarterback results in a strutting, chest pounding exhibition by the defensive player. In fact, it seems like there isn’t a tackle anywhere on the field that can’t result in a floor show worthy of Vegas. And none of these self-adulating demonstrations calls for a penalty of any kind.

And when do the celebratory violations, like Seth’s, occur? Often they are at the end of very close games after long, and I might add, amazing touchdowns. The Hippocratic oath of officiating is that the referees, “should not determine the outcome of a game.” It should be the athletes on the field that make that determination, and happily in this case the end result was not affected.

But one of these days an excited young ballplayer is going to instinctively throw the ball to the ground or, heaven forbid, into the stands and a 15 yard penalty is going to be accessed. Let’s say that team has only a one or two point lead and the improved field position allows the other team to kick a field goal on the last play of the game to steal a victory from a team that really deserved to win. In a case like that, the referees would have violated their “prime directive”.

Do we have to wait until this shameful circumstance actually occurs, or should the NCAA change this ridiculous rule right now. I say either eliminate the rule altogether right now, or at least change it to a “delay of game” (5 yard) penalty. If you want to discourage the outlandish spectacles of “team bowling pins” or staged “photo shoots”, give referees the flexibility to penalize teams for “excessive” celebration. This would be a judgement call. I’m not sure we can define every possibility, but it’s like pornography, we’ll know it when we see it.