Former Illinois football commit gets funny penalty in disastrous weekend

I would say, 99.9% of the time, I will still root for a kid even if he backs away from his commitment to the Illinois football program.

While I can’t think of any specific times right now, it is all a part of the recruiting game. The Illini have lost recruits, and we have taken recruits from other programs.

One of the former Illinois commits who decided to head elsewhere had a tough weekend. Clay Patterson, the defensive lineman for Stanford, made a great play and kept contain on a Hawaii trick play. At the time, the score was 13-7 in favor of Stanford with under two minutes to go in the first half.

This was a massive play that dropped the Rainbow Warriors back to nearly out of field goal range, a loss of 12 yards. After the big play, Patterson erased all goodwill.

Patterson performed a delayed TikTok dance that caused the refs to throw an unsportsmanlike flag. Instead of Hawaii being on the Stanford 36 yard line, they ended up on the Stanford 19. On the very next play, the Rainbow Warriors threw a touchdown pass.

Not only did that hurt the team, but Patterson’s actions may have actually cost Stanford the game. Hawaii took the lead on the very next play, 14-13, and they never looked back. The final score read 23-20 in favor of Hawaii. If that penalty hadn’t happened, Stanford may have won that game.

Clay Patterson has had quite the journey in college, even after committing to Illinois

Patterson is a journeyman in the college game. Coming out of high school in 2019, he enrolled at Yale to play football. He decided to hit the transfer portal after the 2023 campaign, and Illinois came calling.

Patterson committed to the Illini on December 2. By December 18, he had backed away from his commitment. For those two weeks, I thought the Illini got a good one. Patterson then committed to UNLV on January 14, 2024. In May of that year, he once again hit the transfer portal. He has now spent the past two seasons with Stanford.