The SEC is getting off to a great start welcoming the Red River Rivalry in 2024. If you needed another reason to like the Oklahoma Sooners move to the SEC, you got it this week at SEC media days.
Horns Down isn’t an automatic unsportsmanlike conduct penalty anymore.
To quote the great Toby Rowland: “You can unhitch the wagon! Put the ponies in the barn!” This is a big win in the world of college football.
“Unsportsmanlike conduct needs to fit one of three categories: Is it taunting an opponent? Is it making a travesty of the game? Is it otherwise compromising our ability to manage the game?,” said John McDaid, the conference’s coordinator of football officials, per Brett McMurphy. “There’s a difference between a player giving a signal directly in the face of an opponent, as opposed to doing it with teammates celebrating after a touchdown or on the sideline. To net all that out, every single occurrence is not an act of unsportsmanlike conduct.”
It sounds like it’ll simply boil down to the time and the place. If a player does Horns Down toward the Texas sideline or to a Longhorn on the field, then it’ll result in a 15-yard penalty. When Jackson Arnold and Jaquaize Pettaway meet in the end zone after a 60-yard touchdown strike in the Cotton Bowl and share a moment, Horns Down can and will more than likely be flashed.
Where the Big 12 got it wrong was with a blanket statement on the Horns Down gesture. It looks as if the SEC is going to take a more critically thought-out approach to its application of the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Because in the SEC “it just means more.”
In a conference that houses some of the best rivalries in college football, it’s only right that it has a better perspective on Horns Down.
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