In the past two weeks we have seen three college football players drop the ball before crossing the goal line for a touchdown. This unparalleled ignorance is an epidemic that needs to be brought to a halt.
In the NCAA rulebook, Section 2 Article 1.a addresses how a touchdown is scored. Here it is in plain english.
A touchdown is scored when a ball carrier “penetrates the plane” of the opponent’s goal line. That means a runner with the ball needs to have possession of said ball across said goal line before said touchdown can be scored. This is not a rule that is exclusive to the NCAA. Believe it or not, it’s practiced across the spectrum of football played at all ages. From Pop Warner to high school to the NFL to your backyard game where the “goal line” is an imaginary line between a couple of trees.
Why college football players suddenly seem to fail to grasp this concept is outside anyone’s imagination, but it’s happened in three high profile instances in less than ten days.
Last week it was Clemson returner Ray-Ray McCloud, who prematurely celebrated scoring a touchdown by dropping the ball in the field of play. It rolled into the endzone and officials ruled a touchback, giving Troy possession at the 20 yard line. Clemson only held on to win by six points in a 30-24 victory… imagine if they had lost!
On Saturday, Oklahoma star running back Joe Mixon was fortunate that nobody caught him drop the ball before the goalline on a kickoff return for a touchdown. Not an Ohio State player, not an official, not a replay official, nobody. Even the Fox announcers missed it initially. Had anyone noticed, one of Oklahoma’s few bright spots in their blowout loss wouldn’t have counted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA72a0gg5ms
Later on Saturday night, California running back Vic Enwere was on his way to score the game-clinching touchdown with the Bears leading the Texas Longhorns 50-43. Incredibly, Enwere, like those before him on this list, dropped the ball at the one yard line. Amazingly for Cal, they were awarded the ball on the one yard line because the officials ruled there was not an immediate recovery (even though a Texas player picked up the loose ball). From there, Cal was able to run out the clock without another fiasco.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Slate even compiled a list of 27 occurrences where players have dropped or fumbled the ball before crossing the goal line on a touchdown and all but four of them have happened since DeSean Jackson did it in a high school All-America game in 2005. Jackson would go on to popularize the boneheaded trend in a 2008 Monday Night Football game against the Cowboys when he was playing with the Eagles.
Inconceivably, and I hope you’re taking a break while you’re reading this because it’s tough for the human mind to digest so much incompetence in such a short timespan without suffering a serious malfunction, it’s happened ELEVEN times in college football alone just since the beginning of the 2013 season. Maybe the most infamous example came in 2015 when Utah’s Kaelin Clay dropped the ball and Oregon recovered it and returned it for a touchdown the other way.
Logic would dictate that college football coaches around the country, who are paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to do their job, would show that tape… or tape of any of these brainfarts… to their players and tell them never, ever, ever, ever to do this under any circumstance. Why? See Section 2 Article 1.a from above.
I don’t even understand where the temptation comes from to drop the ball before the goal line. Are players already dreaming up of what they’re going to do to celebrate and they just lose concentration? Are they allergic to leather and they can only carry the football for a limited amount of time? Is the football just too heavy to carry the extra two yards safely into the endzone? WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?
We all love our fair share of bloopers and boneheaded plays across sports, but this pattern of seeing players drop the ball before the goal line takes the cake because it’s so antithetical to the actual purpose of the game. These aren’t just “mistakes” or “bloopers.” This isn’t someone airballing a free throw or seeing the ball slip out of a quarterback’s hand because at least in those instances the athletes are actually trying to fulfill their objective. This is a complete failure when it comes to the rules of the game. Let’s parallel the dropping the ball analogy to other sports to see how ludicrous it truly is:
– Imagine if LeBron James was on his way to a breakaway dunk and instead of throwing the ball through the net, he threw it into the crowd to begin his early celebration.
– Imagine if Kris Bryant hits a home run, rounds third, and runs straight to his dugout to begin celebrating with teammates before crossing home plate and actually scoring a run.
– Imagine Jimmie Johnson pulling off the racetrack to do donuts in the infield before taking the checkered flag.
– Imagine Michael Phelps leaping out of the pool to celebrate a gold medal without actually touching the wall.
– Imagine Usain Bolt slowing down and getting passed in the final meters to lose a race. Well, Bolt has actually done the slowing down part, but at least he still finished first and provided us some fantastic memes in the process.
There’s nothing in sports that quite matches the brainlessness of dropping the ball before the goal line. Hopefully after the events of the last two weeks and all the nationwide attention paid to this epidemic, we will finally see it come to an end. Of course, the actual over/under for the next player to do this is November 1st.
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