One of the most famous moments in college basketball history came when Michigan’s Chris Webber called a timeout that his team didn’t have in the closing moments of the national championship game. In basketball, calling a timeout when you can’t is a technical foul, and that penalty sealed Michigan’s fate and handed North Carolina the championship.
In the NFL, the rules are different. Although Joe Gibbs famously got a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct for using back-to-back timeouts to ice the kicker, icing the kicker is the only situation in which consecutive timeouts are a penalty. Instead, the officials are just supposed to ignore it if a player or coach calls timeout when his team is out of timeouts, or in other situations when timeouts can’t be called.
One of those situations came up on Sunday, when the Seahawks called a timeout that wasn’t available to them. NFL head of officiating Dean Blandino admitted the officials erred when they stopped the clock, but there was no penalty against the Seahawks. Blandino says it may be time to change that, and the league could add a penalty for calling timeout a team doesn’t have.
“We shouldn’t shut it down, we shouldn’t grant the timeout, but there is no foul associated with that,” Blandino said. “A lot of discussion about this in the past, it’ll come up again: Should this be a delay of game penalty? Should a team be allowed to call consecutive timeouts? That will all be part of the discussion and we’ll see where the competition committee and the membership ultimately land.”
The 15-yard penalty given to Gibbs seems harsh, but no penalty at all for taking a timeout the team doesn’t have feels wrong, too. The NFL should add a delay of game penalty to the rules, enforced any time a team calls timeout when it’s not allowed to call timeout.
