Targeting rule in effect across college football

Safety D.J. Swearinger has taken his physical play from South Carolina to the NFL’s Houston Texans, but there are several Gamecocks who have promised to carry on his legacy of big hits.

They will have to be more careful than ever this season. The hit against UAB that earned Swearinger a suspension the next week against Missouri will draw an automatic ejection under a new rule passed in March by the NCAA.

“I sit on the committee (the Playing Rules Oversight Panel) so if you don’t like them, you can yell at me,” first-year Arkansas coach Bret Bielema said.

The new rule, which will be on top of the existing 15-yard penalty for players “who target and contact defenseless players above the shoulders”, is designed to speak to players in the only language they know, Bielema said.

Adding immediate ejection to the penalty “was a huge step,” Bielema said. “Players don’t understand anything except a loss of playing time. You start removing someone from a game and you get their attention. I don’t know if there are going to be a lot of ejections, but what’s going to happen is you are going to change player behavior.”

SEC commissioner Mike Slive compared the penalty to disciplining children.

“The sooner you can impose the penalty for the act, the more effective it is,” he said. “This allows us to deal with that issue right then and there.”

South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier called the rule “a little severe.”

“If it’s intentional and trying to really hurt somebody, I can see that, but sometimes two guys are going for the ball and you’re going to have some helmet-to-helmet stuff,” Spurrier said. “We are going to have to see how it all works out.”

For the rule to be accepted by coaches, the committee added the caveat that any ejection would be immediately reviewed via instant replay. If the replay official sees conclusive evidence that there was no helmet-to-helmet contact, he can overturn the call immediately.

“As coaches, we were very, very concerned that a ref could see a bang-bang play and not know what is was and throw a flag,” Bielema said. “We wanted to make sure we have ability to take another look at that.”

“That made it more palatable,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said.

If the penalty occurs in the first half of the game, the player is ejected for the remainder of the game. If the penalty occurs in the second half of the game, the player is ejected for the remainder of the game and the first half of the next game.

Bielema’s time on the committee was eye-opening, he said.

“We saw some very, very potentially life-threatening plays,” he said. “We are trying to deter players from leading with their heads.”

More player-safety changes could be coming soon, Bielema indicated, including a rule defensive coaches across the league have been asking for since the dramatic rise in fast-paced offenses in the sport. The new rule, which still is early in the discussion phase, would allow an automatic pause during drives to allow defensive substitutions.

“Maybe every first down you have to allow a 15-second substitution (window),” Bielema said. “There are times where you can’t get a defensive substitution in during eight- and 10-play drives. That has an effect on safety of that student-athlete that I think is really real.”

What don’t appear imminent are any additional restrictions on how college football teams practice, such as limiting full-contact practices.

“I think you have to do it enough to teach it properly and to get good at it. If you keep watering it down and then say, ‘Just go play’ and you are not good at the fundamentals of it, you could probably cause more problems,” Richt said.

Richt and Vanderbilt coach James Franklin believe fans would be surprised at how little hitting goes on at college football practices.

“We spend a lot of our time doing walk-throughs,” Franklin said. “That’s very, very common in college football. I think people would be surprised how much college football has changed in the last 10 years.”

Rule changes

Other rules changes coming to college football in 2014:

This story was originally published May 29, 2013 at 8:51 PM.