Except, of course, the officials reviewed the play, and
contrary to what everyone except the most diehard and delusional Michigan fan
saw, they declared there was still a second on the clock. As fate would have it, the Wolverines, given
a second chance, actually scored a 47-yard touchdown and won the game, 13-12.
NBC announcers assured us that their clock was synched to
the game clock, but apparently it wasn’t.
Or maybe it was. There are a lot
of “proofs” out there (here’s one) that
would seem to show that the officials ultimately got it right. Maybe they did, but what was created was a
situation in which everyone loses.
Let’s start with the problem itself, and assume for now that
the officials ultimately made the correct call.
That means that whoever claimed to have synched NBC’s clock to the official
game clock is either incompetent or lying.
Curmie doesn’t know how the process is supposed to work—whether the
responsibility lies with a technician from NBC, or the Big 10, or the stadium—but
somebody fucked up big time. Certainly,
NBC took a hit for their role.
It is clear that WMU safety Micah Davis had stepped out of
the back of the endzone and not re-established inbounds before touching the
ball. That would mean that the clock
should stop as soon as he made contact; if he’d been inbounds, it wouldn’t have
been until the ball hit the ground. Ironically,
since there was no Michigan player who could conceivably have caught the ball
inbounds, had Davis just ducked and let the ball sail out the back of the
endzone, the clock wouldn’t stop until the ball hit the ground; that might have
been long enough to make everything else moot.
That’s not Davis’s fault, of course: he simply did what he was trained
to do, and he can’t be expected to simultaneously judge the location of
everyone else.
Nor can we blame the clock operator, whose job responsibilities
do not include tracking whether a player is out of bounds for a moment. The job is to watch the ball; anything else is
a distraction.
It’s also true that all the Broncos needed to do was to
defend another Hail Mary and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But it’s reasonable to suggest that their focus
might have been shaken by the excitement of believing they’d just won a huge
upset, only to have it snatched away.
They’d be angry, shocked, disbelieving… not the best headspace from
which to defend against a legitimately good quarterback/receiver combo.
Western Michigan lost a game they had every reason to
believe they’d won. Michigan won, but millions
of fans saw them lose, and their victory may have cost them more than a loss
would have, if for no other reason than that the final sequence made headlines
long after the game was over. Two other
things, neither relevant to this particular game (or were they?) didn’t help.
First, it’s generally the case that in inter-conference
games, it’s the visiting team that provides the officiating crew, as indeed the
SEC did when Oklahoma played at Michigan the following week. That’s not always the case, of course, so
whereas one might have expected a MAC crew, it wasn’t a huge surprise that this
contract called for the Big 10 to provide the officials. (There are only so many MAC crews, after all,
and a lot of MAC teams were on the road that weekend.) Still, it was indeed a Big 10 team that made
what everyone thought was an obviously wrong call.
A fair number of people are still convinced that WMU was
cheated outed of the victory, especially since a different MAC team, UMass,
unquestionably the worst FBS team last year, has already beaten another Big 10
team, Rutgers, on the road earlier that day.
The Big 10’s official statement, however accurate it might be, sure
reads more like a defense of the decision than an honest evaluation.
Plus, of course, Michigan football has been the poster child
for scandals of late: sign-stealing and impermissible recruiting,
not to mention the head coach having an affair with a staffer…
The suggestion that Michigan would cheat if they thought they might get away
with it is rather like saying that Donald Trump might not really have lower
drug prices by over 500%. If nothing
else, the end of the WMU game reminded everyone of Michigan’s past transgressions.
Oh, and by the way, the officials’ decision to add a second
back on the clock violated NCAA protocols.
That’s not Curmie saying that; it’s the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee,
who “agreed that the instant replay protocols were not followed in the
contest’s second-to-last play. Had the protocols been followed, the outcome of
the game would have been different.”
Still, they couldn’t (or at least didn’t) award the game to Western
Michigan, so they look pretty impotent.
The good news, little though it may be, is that with the
notable exceptions noted above, there’s little effect. Yes, the WMU players would love to be able to
tell their grandkids that they’d won in the Big House, but telling them about
how they’d been screwed makes for a great story, too. Importantly neither team will make or not
make playoff or bowl games based on this result except in the unlikely event that
Michigan goes exactly 3-6 in their Big 10 season.
Of course, Colorado beat Missouri in 1990 in the second “5th Down” game,
allowing the Buffs to claim co-ownership of the national championship. This was in the days before a national
championship game; we can blame the voters for that one.
Notice that Curmie said “second” in the previous sentence. Lesser known to most folks, but not to Curmie, who attended both schools in question, happened well before Curmie was born: when Cornell scored a touchdown against Dartmouth on what should have been 5th down in their game in 1940. Cornell officials discovered the error and sent a telegram to Dartmouth, conceding the game. Uh… don’t expect anyone associated with any FBS team to even approach that level of honesty or sportsmanship: not Colorado in 1990, not Michigan in 2026. Curmie would like to believe it could still happen in the Ivy League, but he wouldn’t bet on it.
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