Kirby Smart contends that Notre Dame's brilliant late game substitution on critical fourth down was illegal

It was an absolutely brilliant move by Marcus Freeman in the biggest game of his young head coaching career.

After sending out his punt team on 4th and 1 with a little under 8 minutes remaining in the game, and holding onto a 13-point lead, the Irish rushed off all 11 players on their punt team and replaced them with 11 offensive players.

Georgia scrambled, and officials stood over the ball to allow an opportunity for Kirby Smart and his squad to sub, before the ball was eventually snapped with a second left on the play clock.

A hard count by Riley Leonard (barely) drew a Bulldog defender offsides, leading to a free play for Notre Dame, which Leonard took the opportunity to throw deep shot up the Irish sideline, but the attempt fell incomplete.

Here's that sequence.

The move earned the Irish a first down, and they were able to maintain possession, get another first down, and milk critical time off the clock.

Immediately after the play, cameras panned to Kirby having rather enthusiastic conversations with officials where he appeared to be arguing that what Notre Dame did was not allowed.

After the game, when asked about it, Smart explained his perspective.

"It's really unfortunate because I've been told by our head of officials in the SEC that you can't do that. You can't run 11 on and 11 off."

"We did in in 2017 against Tennessee. We practice that and repped that against teams trying to do it and were told by officials that you could not do that, so we were trying to say you couldn't do that."

"We got our defense out there. We were fine. I would have gone for it if I was them, so I don't think they were planning on going for it. They were going to hard count us, and we were prepared for that. We do it every week, and we jumped offsides."

"But we were also told you couldn't do that by our league."

If Kirby is right about being told that from the SEC head of officials, we can add this rule and targeting to the list of things officials need to get on the same page about.