That's not the NCAA (or NFHS) rule. If there is an accepted live ball foul (or offsetting fouls) by either team and it does not specify a loss of down, then an untimed down will be played.

No, it's not. CT1 got it right. IG can occur only when a passer tries to prevent a loss of field position (between being down there and the previous spot) or of time in the period. You can throw the ball to a space with no receivers if you're not doing so intentionally for either purpose -- I gave the example above of a cross-up regarding the receiver's route. I've seen plenty of passes like that that were correctly not flagged for that reason. If this weren't the case, those "to conserve" provisions wouldn't've been written into paras. f-h.

Baseball guy. Question: Can a football coach lodge a protest of a rule missaplication after a play?

Result of the game is final.

Letter of the rule vs spirit. It's grounding by the spirit. I'd flag this every time.

I know that. The question is whether at the end of the play where IG was called can the coach go to the official and protest that the untimed down is not correct?

No, it's completely against the spirit of IG. The IG provisions were there just to keep teams from taking unfair advantage of the rules on incomplete forward passes that give you back the previous spot & stop the clock. This is a play that would've worked just as well had it been a backward pass.

Maybe what there should be is a rule specifically to keep a team from using up a few extra secs. by throwing the ball high in the air and/or far out of bounds, but there isn't any right now.

Yes, he can -- IF he realizes that the officials are in error. (Even if a coach doesn't ask for a conference, replay should have caught such an egregious error.)

In this case, OKSt Coach Mike Gundy admitted in his post-game press conference that he didn't know the rule. Maybe if they paid him a little more......

No, it is not baseball and they go back and replay that portion of the game. That would be the same with most sports that I am aware of.

Peace

I thought about this, but the only down where this would ever be an issue is 4th down as it was in this game. I think adding a rule to somehow make what OSU did a penalty that would include an untimed down is unnecessary because there are other methods of burning 4 seconds from the clock on 4th down. Unless the offense is taking the snap inside the 5 yard line, a QB can usually run around for 4 seconds and just slide down. With a 3 point lead, the OSU QB could have ran the 40 yard dash through the back of the end zone and taken a safety. I'm confident he's not running a sub-4 second 40, and I think between the head start he would have had and even minimal blocking, he would have won that race.

A player, substitute or the head coach my request a conference between the head coach and the referee if the coach believes a rule has been enforced improperly. This request must occur before the next play begins (snap or free kick) and before the end of the half. If the ruling is not changed, the team is charged a time out or a delay penalty if no timeouts remain.

So, no, it's not a protest like baseball would handle it. But, there is a method for the coach to ask if he believes the officials are making a rules error.

Forgive me, but what part of NFHS 7-5-2-e "An illegal forward pass is a foul. Illegal forward passes include:
a
b
c
d
e. A pass intentionally thrown incomplete to save loss of yardage or to conserve time."

does NOT apply specifically to the action described in this situation? The key differential between this play and your example seems to be intent, as determined by the covering official (duly empowered to render such judgments).

Well, to be fair, they weren't trying to conserve time(they wanted time to elapse), Were they really trying to save yardage? Not really, the intent of the pass was to run out the clock. I believe the only reason this was called was he was still in the pocket, and no receiver in area of pass. Now by the letter of the law, those are factors in IG, however, I'm not 100% sure I would have called IG on this play, but can certainly understand why it was. The real error was the misapplication of the penalty allowing an untimed down.

Depends on your definition of conserve time. They wanted to keep more of the game time for themselves instead of sharing it with the other team :-)

I would interpret conserve time as save time. They didn't want to save game time, they wanted it to run out.

If you want to conserve energy are you wanting to use up the small amount that you have or do want to save as much as you can?