DALLAS, Texas — Big 12 coordinator of football officials Walt Anderson met with MetroNews to break down video from several 2012 West Virginia games, explaining “the fine line” between legal hits and illegal targeting.
Beginning this season that fine line becomes paramount, with targeting carrying an automatic ejection in college football. If a player is flagged in the first half, he must sit out the remainder of that game. Any second-half disqualification means the offending player also is barred the first half of his team’s ensuing game.
“It’s not going to be an easy rule for us to work on the field—and off the field in replay—but we’re forced with enforcing the rule,” Anderson said. “We want to work at being as consistent as we can.”
Using the strike zone example from baseball, Anderson showed that at times there’s only a “six-inch difference between a foul and a player being out of the game and no foul at all.”
As he illustrates in the video above, sometimes the difference is much less than six inches.