Steve Jones

@stevejones_cj

Remember that confusing penalty and game-clock sequence at the end of Louisville's season-opening loss to Auburn in September?

The one that included Bobby Petrino calling his final timeout – and being criticized on social media for it – while the clock was temporarily stopped after the Tigers had been flagged for offensive holding? The one that set up Auburn to run off the entire final minute and secure a 31-24 win?

As it turns out, that late-game sequence may have contributed to a change in this year's college football rulebook.

ACC Coordinator of Officials Dennis Hennigan explained Thursday at the ACC Kickoff that a new rule has been added nationally this season that will give a team that's trailing in the final two minutes the option to keep the clock stopped until the next snap after a penalty has been committed by a team that is in the lead.

Hennigan told The Courier-Journal that the ACC had submitted the U of L-Auburn sequence to the NCAA football rules committee and proposed the rule change, which was aimed at preventing teams that are in the lead late in games from benefiting from their own fouls.

"(That Louisville play) was our impetus to send in the rule-change proposal," he said. "... What (the new rule) does is it gives the coach of the team that's behind the option to say, 'I want to start this clock on the snap after you administer the foul.'"

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Hennigan doesn't know if any other conferences proposed a similar rule change, so he's not certain if the change was solely prompted by the U of L-Auburn example.

To recap, here's how the final minute of the U of L-Auburn game went down:

Up 31-24 with the ball and facing third-and-2 in U of L territory, Auburn ran for 8 yards and what would have been a game-sealing first down. But the Tigers were called for holding with 52 seconds left. So they had to run third down again. While the clock was stopped and the penalty yardage was being marked off, Petrino made what seemed like a puzzling decision to burn his final timeout. Why, after all, would you use a timeout when the clock was already stopped?

But as it turns out, under last year's rules, the officials had informed Petrino that the game clock was going to restart once the ball was set – not on the snap – and Auburn would have been able to run off nearly all of a 25-second play clock.

"They committed a holding foul, and it just worked out that way," Hennigan said.

Once the game started back following the timeout, Auburn ran for short yardage on third-and-12, ran off nearly all of a 40-second play clock, then heaved an incomplete fourth-down pass that used up the final seconds.

Under the new rule, the clock would have stayed stopped after the holding until the next snap, and Petrino could have preserved the timeout.

A lot of people assumed Petrino had made an error when he called the final timeout, but Hennigan said, "That couldn't be further from the truth as far as what I saw."