I'd just like to comment on how reasonable the discussion has been in this thread, and that's encouraging. Thanks to LJB for splitting the discussion out of the game thread.
My personal take is that the reason for the rule is honorable, the way it's written is better than it was originally, but still open to interpretation. The addition of allowing replay to create a targeting penalty is a good one, as evidenced in the LSU-Oklahoma game where an off-the-ball launch into a player's helmet was missed live and correctly detected by replay which issued the ejection.
The Wade-Lawrence play was bang-bang, everybody was watching, and the combination of Wade lowering his head to expose the crown and the QB ducking into the contact created the technical definition of a targeting penalty. Most of the time we hate having the refs/officials trying to judge intent, and the written rule doesn't directly instruct them to do so, so it was a legitimate penalty. But I've seen similar plays reviewed several times this year, some initiated by the replay booth and some not, and sometimes they eject the player and sometimes they don't. It's still enforced inconsistently, but I can't say that this ruling was incorrect, it was just a call that isn't always made and was a tough break for the Buckeyes. Ejection in this case was overly punitive.
The ruling of an incomplete pass on the scoop-and-score, however, was a travesty that I'll never be able to forget. I wish one of the final two Buckeye drives had resulted in a TD so it wouldn't be so painful to talk about. The other thing is that after seeing the non-call on LSU for PI near the sideline when the score was 14-7 (I think) made me say out loud that I could just see the SEC refs jobbing Ohio State later in the day. Sadly that was the case on the overturned scoop-and-score. LSU would have won big anyway, but that non-call gave made me nervous about the officiating before the Fiesta Bowl kickoff.
