In one of the biggest games of college football’s opening weekend this season, Penn State upended Wisconsin in a slobberknocker of a duel that evoked the sport’s greatest features: a raucous home crowd; a long game-winning completion; and a pair of game-securing defensive stands in the waning minutes.
While those highlights stirred college football’s feelings and helped usher in this return-to-normalcy season, one specific play from that game—a penalty, of all things—drew considerable buzz.
During Wisconsin’s critical fourth-quarter drive, quarterback Graham Mertz scrambled for a first down when he was met by Nittany Lions linebacker Ellis Brooks. Brooks smashed into Mertz in a vicious and loud collision, knocking him out of bounds with an act that is no longer permitted in the game. He lowered his head, launched his body and projected his helmet as a weapon, directing it into Mertz’s cap in a play that triggered a penalty: targeting.
Penn State was docked 15 yards, and Brooks experienced one of the more severe consequences in the game: He was ejected for the remainder of that half as well as the first half of the Nittany Lions’ next game.
In the television booth at the stadium, speaking to a national audience, Fox broadcaster Joel Klatt had a message for the sport.
“I just hate the ejection,” he said. “This is a problem with this rule. You gotta fix this, college football. It’s a disgrace.”
Well, they just might.
Among high-ranking college football leaders, there is movement afoot to at least consider an adjustment to the targeting foul’s most harsh individual punishment—the ejection. In fact, the NCAA’s own coordinator of officials, Steve Shaw, and a handful of conference commissioners as well as athletic administrators and coaches, expect the rule to be examined this offseason. By the time the 2022 season kicks off, the hope is that the policy looks different.
There is, however, a problem. At this point, a proposal does not exist to modify the rule that has universal agreement among the sport’s various bodies.
“I have not seen a sophisticated plan and structure,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey says. “I will be the first to say I’m open to alternative approaches, but they have to be grounded in eliminating these hits. The ejection and suspension from the next half of a game is a fairly blunt instrument, but it makes the point to change behavior.”
