Targeting: The Gray Area In College Football
As safety continues to be a point of emphasis in the sport of football, targeting is an excellent tool to reduce major injuries, although, as it currently stands, it may be doing more bad than good.
After controversy over targeting penalties in the Colorado vs. Colorado State football game Saturday night, it got me thinking: Is the current form of targeting accomplishing the goals it was made to achieve?
For most people in America, Saturdays are for college football. The weekly occurrence of the most violent game in the world has been one of the most popular forms of entertainment for decades, and with the use of new and improved technology, the sport has never been safer. Even with minor improvements to player safety each year, plenty of plays leave fans wondering how there aren’t more rules in place to protect the athletes on the field. Because of this, targeting was introduced to college football in 2008 after Congress began pressuring the NCAA to reduce head trauma and concussions.
All-in-all, targeting is an incredible idea that has made football safer. Players have been forced to be more aware of how they tackle, and how it affects the player they are wrestling to the ground. But even with these advancements, there’s one huge issue with the rule: the gray area is massive.
The NCAA says for a tackle to be considered targeting, it must meet at least one of, if not all of these criteria: making forcible contact against an opponent with the crown of his helmet, launching into a player, making an upward and forward thrust attack to the head or neck, or leading with the head, neck, or shoulder to the head or neck area of the opponent. Targeting can also occur on a defenseless player, but I’ll get into that in a minute.
At face value, these definitions of targeting all seem great. Players shouldn’t be hitting their opponent in the head or neck area, or launching head-first into a player. Those things should be self-explanatory, and shouldn’t need to be argued. But what about when the offensive player lowers his head first and initiates contact? Or when a defensive player is already in the process of using their shoulder to tackle, or when the offensive player makes a last-second move to make a hit more devastating?
This is exactly what occurred in the first targeting call of 2023, where Jacksonville State linebacker Larry Worth made a tackle after UTEP tight end Zach Fryar made a grab and immediately began lowering his head and body, resulting in helmet-to-helmet contact, with Fryar’s flying off. Worth was then ejected for targeting. This is the kind of play that displays the intricacies of the current version of the targeting penalty. If you were to only look at Worth’s tackling form leading up to the tackle itself, you’d say he had perfect technique that linebackers across the country should be studying. But because Fryar’s body began lowering to the ground, helmet-to-helmet contact occurred. This kind of contact is something you never want to see, and I recognize that there are a lot of instances where a player leads with the crown of his helmet, which causes this head-to-head contact. But this play is exactly why targeting doesn’t make much sense in its current form. Worth didn’t lead with the crown of his helmet, didn’t launch at the offensive player, and didn’t make an upward or forward thrust upward when making the tackle. The only reason the helmet-to-helmet contact even occurred was because of a movement the offensive player made. Sure, the helmet flying off made the tackle look worse than it was, but again, the defensive player has no control over that either.
Now let’s flash forward to the targeting controversy that occurred in the Colorado vs. Colorado State game Saturday night. In this particular game, two instances had fans calling for targeting. Let’s start with the obvious one. In overtime, Colorado State edge rusher Mohamed Kamara was ejected for targeting after making helmet-to-helmet contact with Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders (pictured). Kamara clearly made an upward thrusting motion, while leading with the crown of his helmet, confirming targeting to be the correct call, whether Ram fans like it or not. The targeting call in question, though, occurred in the first half, where Rams safety Henry Blackburn committed a late hit against Travis Hunter at the end of a play, which ultimately forced Hunter to go to the hospital with a lacerated liver. The hit was obviously late and deserved to be penalized which it was. CU fans took offense to the collision, however, and instantly began calling for a targeting penalty, an ejection from the game, and some kind of suspension. The problem, though, is that nothing about the hit fits the description of targeting. Sure, it was a dirty, vicious hit that deserved to be penalized, but targeting? Well, it doesn’t exactly fit the current description.
Part of the issue in this instance is the lack of education from fans about the rule. People see a big hit and immediately think it’s targeting because of how forceful it looks. And these fans may not be wrong to think that these kinds of hits deserved to be pegged as targeting. But the description of it is what needs to be fixed to make targeting a successful addition to the game.
As for what exactly needs to be added or changed verbiage-wise, I don’t have an answer. Maybe wider, more descriptive examples would help expand the rule and make hits like the one against Hunter penalized for targeting. Or maybe, we need a secondary targeting penalty, where if a hit doesn’t quite fit the description of targeting, but is still too gruesome to have occurred, the penalty becomes a 30-yard penalty, instead of the standard 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty. Again, I don’t know what will help targeting be more consistent, and maybe it is just the education surrounding the current form of the rule that needs more focus, but it is something that we must strive to do if we want it to be effective moving forward.
Because as of now, targeting is nothing more than just a great idea, with inconsistent results.
Sources: The Sporting News, NCAA Publications
