Premature celebration: College football player Kaelin Clay celebrates too early, allowing other team to score

IF you’re going to drop the ball before actually scoring, you’d better not celebrate. Or allow the opposition to pick the ball up and run 99 yards for a touchdown.

Oregon v Utah

THE brain fade of the weekend?

That goes to Utah Utes wide receiver Kaelin Clay who not only dropped the football before the end zone to start celebrating, but then watched in horror as the Oregon Ducks scooped it up, ran 99 yards and scored a touchdown at the opposite end of the field.

Clay became coaching enemy No. 1 when he tore through the Oregon defence for what should have been a certain 78-yard touchdown.

But knowing no one could catch him, he deliberately dropped the ball in celebration as he crossed the line into the end zone.

Only problem was he pulled the trigger to early, letting go of the ball less than a metre before actually scoring.

I TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS GAME BY MY SELFISH ACTIONS...I'll take this one 😔

— Kaelin Clay (@CALiboy4) November 9, 2014

While Clay accepted full responsibility for his premature showboating, his coach accepted a portion of the blame, too.

“Hand the ball to the ref,” Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said.

“We haven’t done a good enough job because he didn’t do it. That falls on coaching. Hand the ball to the ref when you score a touchdown. We gotta coach it better. We haven’t taught it until a player has learned it. If he hasn’t learned it, we haven’t taught it correctly so we have to do a better job as coaches on that,” Whittingham said.

“It’s very frustrating. He knows. But as a coach, you have to go over it again and explain it. We went over this in the beginning of the year because we had a couple of close calls. We thought we had it corrected. But tonight it showed up again.”

After leading 7-0 early in the game, Utah went on to lose 51-27.

Sometimes there’s nothing to do but hide.

This is the Utah wide receiver Kaelin Clay's reaction to the call being upheld. pic.twitter.com/sr1QFDWsI8

— Woody Wommack (@RivalsWoody) November 9, 2014