The trick play so tricky it tricks refs

Oklahoma scored a TD on this illegal trick play that refs ALWAYS miss. (PLUS! A new buffalo rises, another embarrassing L for Bill Belichick, AND THE AGE OF HOOSIER IS UPON US)

Hey folks, I’m changing up the way weekends work here—instead of producing one MEGA-NEWSLETTER about college football and the NFL, I’m breaking them up into two separate newsletters. Everybody else in the world had already figured out that you need to split your college football and NFL coverage apart, but after two weeks of trying to cram an entire weekend of football into one email, I came to the same conclusion.

So here’s the college football newsletter—and here’s the button you click to get it in your inbox every week:

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The perfect football crime

You can’t make a football player disappear. Rabbits, doves, and other animals which can fit in hats — sure. But hiding a 6-foot, 200-pound wide receiver in front of a stadium of 100,000 fans, with cameras watching? No magician would dream of pulling off that vanishing act.

But every once in a while, football teams give it a shot. I love stagecraft and deception on the gridiron so much that I wrote a whole article about hide-a-player tactics for The Ringer, and last year I wrote about Bowling Green disguising their quarterback as a punter. And there’s one hide-a-player tactic that’s so successful at getting the defense to lose track of a player that it’s been outlawed… but teams keep getting away with it.

The NCAA specifically bans offenses from pretending to substitute a player… then keeping them on the field, undetected and and throwing them a touchdown. The rulebook is very explicit and repeats itself to make the message clear.

No simulated replacements or substitutions may be used to confuse opponents… No tactic associated with substitutes or the substitution process may be used to confuse opponents… This includes any hideout tactic with or without a substitution…

And in case the ref isn’t quite sure what a “hideout tactic” is, the casebook in the rulebook’s appendix describes the exact play in question to make sure you know it’s illegal:

A1 leaves the field of play during a down. Team A huddles with 10 players. Substitute A12 enters, and A2 simulates leaving the field but sets near the sideline for a “hide-out’’ pass. RULING: Penalty—15 yards from the previous spot. This is a simulated replacement of a player to confuse opponents.

This play has been outlawed in football rulebooks since 1954, when NFL commissioner Bert Bell got so mad at the Rams running a hideout play that he issued a league memo the very next day outlawing the play.

But there’s one problem: Just because officials know this is illegal doesn’t mean they’ll catch it when it happens. In 2009, Georgia Tech pretended to sub out Demaryius Thomas against Clemson, only for the team’s kicker to throw him a touchdown pass. A few days later, ACC officials said “my bad, we should’ve thrown a flag.”. In the same season, Notre Dame ran a hideout play against USC for a touchdown. Again, Pac-10 officials had to issue a mea culpa a few days later. (Ole Miss ran it in 2023… but got away with it so thoroughly that the SEC didn’t say anything.)

And Saturday, Oklahoma threw a touchdown pass against Auburn by having wide receiver Isaiah Sategna III run towards the sideline, unseen by the officials and even the cameras. It turned 2nd-and-22 into a touchdown:

And now, SEC officials have announced that they should have thrown a flag. Whoops! It’s like George W. Bush said. Fool me once, shame on you… fool me twice… well…. I uh, touchdown Sooners.

Refs do catch this play sometimes—Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan got flagged for it in 2015 (before they figured out other ways to disguise operatives on sidelines), and in the NFL, the Rams got caught in 2021. (The Browns almost got away with it in 2014 when Johnny Manziel pretended to have a sideline chat with Kyle Shanahan and Mike McDaniel, but the play was flagged for an unrelated illegal shift.)

It makes sense that refs miss it so often. They’re supposed to throw flags when they see penalties. They’re not supposed to throw penalties for inferences, guesses, and other things that probably happened but they didn’t actually see with their two eyes. So when a player runs out of their field of vision and then runs into the end zone with the ball a few seconds later… they can either let it stand or throw a flag based on an assumption. And that’s how you really get into trouble. And this play isn’t reviewable, even though the whole point is that it’s meant to trick people watching the game live.

The touchdown counted, and Oklahoma won 24-17—the illegal touchdown standing as the margin of victory. They’re 4-0 and will be in the top 10 after this week.

Some trick plays work because they’re on the fringes of the rulebook—the loopholes, the technically legal and the yet-to-be-outlawed. Not so much with the hideout play. Everybody knows this is against the rules, and it has been since before you were born. When you call the hideout play, you’re dreaming the thief’s dream: That by the time anybody notices the money is gone, you’ve already scored.

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Look out, Cinderella has a bazooka!

In 2024, Indiana was a cute underdog story. The losingest team in college football history is winning! Awww! Look at football Cinderella! Her slippers are cleats! They got to the College Football Playoff and got blown out, but the fact that they made it was enough. It was a sign that the expanded format would give any team that won enough games to a shot at playing for a championship—even Indiana!

In 2025, Indiana does not appear interested in being cute. The Hoosiers are going to beat you to death with hammers. Saturday they hosted Illinois, the ninth-ranked team in the country, and scored SIXTY THREE points. That’s more than Indiana’s men’s basketball team scored in the Big Ten Tournament last year… and they were methodically moving down the field towards a 10th touchdown when the clock ran out.

I’m all-in on Indiana. Their quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, looks like a future first-round draft pick. They have gone from 68th in the country in rushing yards per attempt to 5th, and could not stop moving the ball on the ground even after going to their third- and fourth-string running backs. Their defense looks better than last year’s. This week’s SP+ ratings haven’t come out yet, but it looks like they’ll be ranked in the top 5.

The Age of Hoosier is upon us. Curt Cignetti doesn’t just want to make one Playoff appearance at Indiana; he wants to keep going back, and maybe win the damn thing. They’ll need to beat elite opponents to do it—but until then, demolishing a top-10 ranked opponent by 53 points is pretty good.

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Of course, The Age Of Hoosier wouldn’t be possible without the dark magic and fashionable college merchandise produced by Homefield Apparel.

Founded by the world’s most powerful Indiana football fan, Homefield once dreamed a dream of 9 Windiana. As the looming menace of Indiana football has grown, so has Homefield, which opened a brick-and-mortar store in Bloomington this year. They’re The Brand Built By IU Football.

homefieldapparel

A post shared by @homefieldapparel

Just this week, they introduced brand new Hoosier gameday gear, including a shirt showing Curt Cignetti, hundreds of feet tall, rising above Bloomington Indiana on his way to dominate the sport:

There is no way to stop Indiana football, or Homefield Apparel. All you can do is purchase their clothing and be comfortable and fashionable as their reign continues.

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The Return of Ralphie

At Tennessee, the mascot is a dog, whose gameday job is to look handsome and bark. At Texas, the mascot is a cow whose gameday job is just to stand there, although he has taken it upon himself to defend his turf from other mascots. At Colorado, the mascot is a legitimately dangerous wild animal who has one of the most complex gameday tasks in college football. Ralphie the Buffalo is not a docile dog or domesticated animal—yeah, there are bison farms, but they’re not really domesticated, you just put a fence around a herd of bison and hope they don’t gore you to death. And on Saturdays, she has to run around Colorado’s field and return to her trailer without getting loose and trampling any opposing linebackers.

Finding the right Ralphie has proven tough. In 2019, the school announced that Ralphie V could no longer lead the team onto the field because she had become too powerful: With past Ralphies, as they aged, their speed typically decreased; with Ralphie V, she has been so excited to run that she was actually running too fast, which created safety concerns for her and her handler.” She had become too powerful Last month, her successor, Ralphie VI was retired for the opposite reason, an “indifference to running.” Two queens, but neither suited for life as a mascot.

On Saturday night, Colorado introduced Ralphie VII, a 700-pound baby, specifying before the game that she was “definitely not indifferent to running.” I think they Goldilocks-ed this one. That big beautiful baby buffalo performed her task perfectly on the first try.

I watched Ralphie run in 2023. I cried a little.

(Maybe you’ve noticed I keep dropping links to my youtube channel in the newsletter…it’s because I’m working on new content over there and you should subscribe so you can see it when it comes out!)

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College Credits

• The embarrassment of Bill Belichick continues, as UNC lost 34-9 to UCF. It’s true that Belichick is in his first year as UNC’s head coach… but so was UCF’s head coach, Scott Frost, and most college football fans think he’s a big idiot while Belichick is considered one of the greatest coaches in history. I stand by what I said here:

• Memphis beat Arkansas 32-31 in one of those wins you’ll savor forever if you’re a Memphis fan—the Tigers rallied back from 18 points and forced a fumble while the Hogs were setting up for a game-winning field goal. The power leagues may have rejected Memphis’ repeated attempts to join their conferences… it might be harder to keep Memphis out of the College Football Playoff.

• Florida lost to Miami after going 0-for-13 on third down. This is difficult, because on first and second downs, you have the chance to advance the ball forwards, getting it closer to the line-to-gain, hypothetically making it easier to convert a first down. At least they didn’t throw five picks this week!

• Dabo Swinney gave a big speech about how people shouldn’t have lost faith in Clemson after their first two losses this year, and then lost to Syracuse. It is unclear whether we’re allowed to lose faith now.

• Two weeks ago, Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy implied it was unfair that Oregon should not schedule schools with smaller budgets before his Cowboys lost 69-3 to the Ducks. Saturday, Oklahoma State played Tulsa—the smallest university in FBS football—and lost 19-12.

• North Texas now celebrates turnovers with a tribute to former North Texas defensive end Stone Cold Steve Austin. (Although he went by “Steve Williams” when he played for the Mean Green.) I’m gonna go ahead and assume this is water.

• We had two 90-point games Saturday: One was Idaho State demolishing the Lincoln Oaklanders 90-0, which was to be expected, the obvious end result of an actual Division I team playing an opponent so fake its own ex-players have described it as "the college Bishop Sycamore.” The other was the Coast Guard Academy beating Nichols College 92-60, setting the new Division III record for points in a game. I kinda hoped the Coast Guard would be better at defense…