Don’t like the penalty? Get rid of the rule

Let’s just get it over with. Strip these referees of their stripes and get them fitted for tunics silk-screened with bull’s-eyes.

Or failing that, jumpsuits in county lockup orange.

What killjoys. It’s amazing that college football made it all the way to Week 2 this year before they ruined the game.

Sports talk outrage – the absolute best kind – still smoldered Monday in the ashes of Washington’s 28-27 loss to Mormon Tabernacle Tech in history’s shortest football game. To recap, it lasted just two seconds – since everything that came before black-hatted field judge Mike McCabe flagged iconic Huskies quarterback Jake Locker for chucking the ball high into the air was inconsequential to the outcome.

The penalty for Locker’s jubilance – innocuous and spontaneous as it was after a brilliant touchdown run – tacked 15 yards onto the Huskies’ try for the tying PAT, which kicker Ryan Perkins bladed straight into the paw of Jan Jorgensen, the fine defensive lineman for Receding Hairline U. This was not Perkins’ fault, as we know, because there’s no way a major college kicker can be expected to put one through the uprights from 35 yards away.

We know this because Huskies coach Tyrone Willingham declared it so Monday afternoon.

“It’s a really tough play,” he said of the penalty on Locker, “because it does in fact change the outcome of the game. You go from kicking a simple 3-yard PAT to kicking a 30-some-yard basically field goal.”

So, apparently, Willingham will be going for it on fourth down the rest of this season unless UW is inside the 5.

Also, about that 3-yard PAT, coach – do they really allow you to snap the ball from 4 yards outside the end line?

Yikes. If chowderheaded referees truly are killing college football, hysteria and hyperbole will at least keep it on life support week to week.

“Officials are taking away the excitement of college football,” huffed ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit.

Really?

The excitement of college football is Jake Locker flipping the ball 20 feet in the air? I could have sworn the excitement is what happened right before that, and after.

OK, OK, we know what Herbstreit was getting at. We just can’t expect him to properly articulate it, being employed on TV and all.

Here was a great dramatic moment, a clutch run for a touchdown in the final seconds. Here is Beaver Cleaver caught up in the moment, sending the ball skyward as he rejoices with his teammates. And here is the penalty flag for excessive celebration.

I’m not sure there can be excessive celebration in that situation. Excessive celebration is what happens in volleyball, when the ladies all slap hands after they lose a point.

But the NCAA rulebook says otherwise, and at that moment McCabe reflexively enforced it – later to be backed up by crew chief Larry Farina, who curiously insisted that, “It was not a judgment call.”

The Pac-10’s coordinator of officiating, Dave Cutaia, didn’t completely agree, telling the Seattle Times that “there’s always a little bit of judgment” – but also noted that the “rule seems pretty cut and dried.”

“Maybe the problem,” Cutaia said, “is that it’s there.”

Ya think?

And who put it there?

Why, college football coaches, that’s who – men like Tyrone Willingham who laud “the sheer joy and excitement for playing the game” that Locker showed, and yet still endorse black-letter law specifically to prohibit it.

Well, not Willingham – though he has served on the American Football Coaches Association rules committee that advises the NCAA panel. But nine of the 13 members of that group are coaches, chaired by the Huskies’ old buddy, Oregon’s Mike Bellotti. The one referee on the committee – Rogers Redding – doesn’t vote.

You don’t want it called? Then don’t put the rule in the book.

Why invent one more reason so peripheral to the game that puts players – to say nothing of the coach’s job, eh, Ty? – at the mercy of the judgment of a referee who has his marching orders in the form of the committee’s dubious “points of emphasis”? Especially when the language couldn’t be more imprecise.

Throwing the ball high into the air – what is that, exactly?

“The rulebooks are written for them to use discretion,” Willingham said.

Sure. And when do coaches want discretion shown? When it benefits them, of course.

Well, not all of them.

“We do have rules for a reason,” said BYU’s Bronco Mendenhall. “They are to teach principles of class and integrity. Sometimes young men in the heat of the moment get overexuberant and the rules are in place to try to keep the game intact and hold on to what is most important in the game and that’s the team element.”

Excessive pontification. If only there was a flag for that.

At my discretion.