George Schroeder

USA TODAY Sports

In a team meeting Sunday, California coach Sonny Dykes planned to issue a new rule.

“Every time we score a touchdown from now on, we will hand the ball directly to an official,” Dykes said.

The edict is in direct response to what happened late Saturday night (or depending on your time zone, early Sunday morning), when Cal running back Vic Enwere broke loose on what seemed like a 55-yard touchdown run to seal victory over Texas, but then — maybe you’ve seen this recently — dropped the football just before reaching the goal line.

It was the third time in two weeks and second time Saturday for a malfunction of the dumbest showboating celebration ever devised. Just a couple of hours earlier, Oklahoma’s Joe Mixon dropped the ball 96 yards into a 97-yard kickoff return. His mistake wasn’t caught by either the officials on the field or the guys in the replay booth, but replays clearly showed he never reached the end zone with the ball.

If it’s not quite an epidemic, it’s at least occurring far too frequently. A week earlier, we watched Clemson’s Ray-Ray McCloud drop the ball a beat too soon, just before he reached the end zone. A week before that, Florida State’s Dalvin Cook lost the ball out of bounds after switching hands for some reason before crossing the goal line.

Cal was up 50-43 and trying to run out the clock when Enwere broke loose up the middle. When he dropped the ball, it bounced into the end zone. Eventually, a Texas player picked it up. But after a replay review, officials awarded possession to California at the 1-yard line with the explanation there had been no immediate recovery.

“If there is a clear recovery in the immediate continuing action, it will belong to the team that recovered the ball,” said Rogers Redding, the NCAA’s national officiating coordinator and secretary-rules editor of the NCAA’s Football Rules Committee, explaining the intent of the rule. “Somebody picked it up and handed it to the official. It’s not like everybody was scrambling for the ball.”

But for a few moments, as they awaited the ruling, Dykes and the Bears were concerned they might have given Texas an unnecessary last chance.

“You go from celebrating to all of the sudden the game is in question,” he said. “So we were very fortunate it worked out the way it did. We’ll talk through it, about the things guys do that they don’t think are a big deal but can have a big impact. What if Texas picks the ball up and runs it back 100 yards for a touchdown? We’ve got a serious problem at that point. We’ve just got to not be selfish. That’s part of growing up.”

Final whistle: Slow start leaves Big 12 way behind in Playoff chase

Cal was able to run out the clock for the victory. And Dykes says the move was out of character for Enwere, a junior he described as “really smart, hard-working and not a selfish kid at all. … Vic felt terrible about it.”

But here’s hoping every coach in America does what Dykes planned to do Sunday afternoon: Instruct players to hang onto the football until safely in the end zone – and then and only then to hand it to an official.

“It’s really a strange phenomenon,” Dykes said. “I don’t understand it. But I can assure you it won’t ever happen to us again. We’ll get it fixed.”

BEST OF WEEK 3 ACTION