re: It’s Thursday and Auburn is still whining about last Saturday

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The trick play so tricky it tricks refs

Oklahoma scored a TD on this illegal trick play that refs ALWAYS miss.

Rodger Sherman


The perfect football crime

You can’t make a football player disappear. Rabbits, doves, and other animals which can fit in hats — sure. But hiding a 6-foot, 200-pound wide receiver in front of a stadium of 100,000 fans, with cameras watching? No magician would dream of pulling off that vanishing act.

But every once in a while, football teams give it a shot. I love stagecraft and deception on the gridiron so much that I wrote a whole article about hide-a-player tactics for The Ringer, and last year I wrote about Bowling Green disguising their quarterback as a punter. And there’s one hide-a-player tactic that’s so successful at getting the defense to lose track of a player that it’s been outlawed… but teams keep getting away with it.

The NCAA specifically bans offenses from pretending to substitute a player… then keeping them on the field, undetected and and throwing them a touchdown. The rulebook is very explicit and repeats itself to make the message clear.

No simulated replacements or substitutions may be used to confuse opponents… No tactic associated with substitutes or the substitution process may be used to confuse opponents… This includes any hideout tactic with or without a substitution…

And in case the ref isn’t quite sure what a “hideout tactic” is, the casebook in the rulebook’s appendix describes the exact play in question to make sure you know it’s illegal:

A1 leaves the field of play during a down. Team A huddles with 10 players. Substitute A12 enters, and A2 simulates leaving the field but sets near the sideline for a “hide-out’’ pass. RULING: Penalty—15 yards from the previous spot. This is a simulated replacement of a player to confuse opponents.

This play has been outlawed in football rulebooks since 1954, when NFL commissioner Bert Bell got so mad at the Rams running a hideout play that he issued a league memo the very next day outlawing the play.

But there’s one problem: Just because officials know this is illegal doesn’t mean they’ll catch it when it happens. In 2009, Georgia Tech pretended to sub out Demaryius Thomas against Clemson, only for the team’s kicker to throw him a touchdown pass. A few days later, ACC officials said “my bad, we should’ve thrown a flag.”. In the same season, Notre Dame ran a hideout play against USC for a touchdown. Again, Pac-10 officials had to issue a mea culpa a few days later. (Ole Miss ran it in 2023… but got away with it so thoroughly that the SEC didn’t say anything.)

And Saturday, Oklahoma threw a touchdown pass against Auburn by having wide receiver Isaiah Sategna III run towards the sideline, unseen by the officials and even the cameras. It turned 2nd-and-22 into a touchdown:



And now, SEC officials have announced that they should have thrown a flag. Whoops! It’s like George W. Bush said. Fool me once, shame on you… fool me twice… well…. I uh, touchdown Sooners.

Refs do catch this play sometimes—Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan got flagged for it in 2015 (before they figured out other ways to disguise operatives on sidelines), and in the NFL, the Rams got caught in 2021. (The Browns almost got away with it in 2014 when Johnny Manziel pretended to have a sideline chat with Kyle Shanahan and Mike McDaniel, but the play was flagged for an unrelated illegal shift.)

It makes sense that refs miss it so often. They’re supposed to throw flags when they see penalties. They’re not supposed to throw penalties for inferences, guesses, and other things that probably happened but they didn’t actually see with their two eyes. So when a player runs out of their field of vision and then runs into the end zone with the ball a few seconds later… they can either let it stand or throw a flag based on an assumption. And that’s how you really get into trouble. And this play isn’t reviewable, even though the whole point is that it’s meant to trick people watching the game live.

The touchdown counted, and Oklahoma won 24-17—the illegal touchdown standing as the margin of victory. They’re 4-0 and will be in the top 10 after this week.

Some trick plays work because they’re on the fringes of the rulebook—the loopholes, the technically legal and the yet-to-be-outlawed. Not so much with the hideout play.

Everybody knows this is against the rules, and it has been since before you were born. When you call the hideout play, you’re dreaming the thief’s dream: That by the time anybody notices the money is gone, you’ve already scored.

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