Wait … what? What just happened here?
It’s a truly remarkable play by Miami – but, as it turns out, it’s also not a legal one. The runner is down on the fourth lateral before he releases the ball, there is an illegal block, and a Miami player runs out on the field before the TD is scored, which is an illegal participation foul. Yet somehow, after reviewing this play for nine minutes, the officials still got it wrong. The entire crew has now been suspended by the ACC for completely messing it up in live time, and then messing it up further still when going under the replay hoods. So on top of a colossal play, you have colossal incompetence. “The last play of the game was not handled appropriately,” ACC Commissioner John Swofford said in the understatement of the year.
Now, there is no mechanism in place to overturn the result of a football game, either in college or in the NFL. Question is, should there be? The obvious answer is “no,” of course – the result on the field should stand, and going about changing the results in some commissioner’s office is a bad idea. Yeah, it sucks, you got jobbed but that’s life.
But curiously enough, there is precedent for it in other sports, the most notable being the (in)famous Pine Tar Incident between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees in 1983, which came to my mind every time they showed George Brett during the just-concluded World Series, since anyone who has seen the video, where Brett goes apoplectic, hears Brett’s name and will think of that particular play before they remember he nearly hit .400 or remember any other aspect of his storied career. The Royals protested the game, and the commissioner upheld their protest, meaning that the game had to be reconvened and restarted at a later date, picking up right where they had left off after Brett’s controversial home run. In fact, there have been at least 15 instances in MLB history where a protest was upheld and play was resumed, most recently on Aug. 19, 2014, when the Giants protested a 2-0, rain-shortened loss to the Cubs in Chicago on account of the grounds crew’s incompetence rendering the field unplayable:
The NBA, meanwhile, has also forced some do-overs in its time, most recently in 2008 when the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat redid the ending of a game three months after the fact when it was discovered that Shaquille O’Neal had been ruled incorrectly to have fouled out of the game with 52 seconds left. Confusing matters further was the fact that, during the three months in between, Shaq had been traded from Miami to Phoenix, so the guy involved in the original mess wasn’t even there to replay the last 52 seconds. The previous replay in the NBA, involving the Spurs and the Lakers in 1982, was even nuttier, involving a fake free throw.
I’ve actually been involved with a particular oddity in basketball on a couple of occasions. When I was playing in Britain, we had a game in Cambridge and we won … uh, I don’t know what the final score was but we won by 7 pts., but I think it was something like 91:84, so we’ll use that for the purposes of discussion. Anyway, we started looking over the scorebook after the game was over and it didn’t add up. There was 89 for us and 86 for Cambridge. What we finally figured out had happened was that, since this basketball in Britain in the 1980s and we were playing in some weird building masquerading as a sports hall, it didn’t have an electronic scoreboard and we had some manual flip board by the scorer’s table, and though we were down by two points at halftime, when we changed ends to start the second half, the scoreboard operator got confused and no one involved seemed to notice. The final score was therefore officially changed to 89:86 after the game was over.
Now, it didn’t affect the outcome in that case, but I do remember a case with two high schools in the same league as ours – the three of our schools all vying for the league championship at the time – playing a game where one team won by two points, but when they checked the official scorebook afterwards (which is the official record in basketball and not the scoreboard), they realized that the scoreboard operator had somehow forgotten to put a basket by the losing team on the board. So the game was actually tied, and then the officials had to go into the locker rooms after the fact and tell the players, a good number of whom were showering if not already dressed, that they had to go out on the floor again and play an overtime in an empty gym, the fans all having long since gone home.
But trying to figure something out like this in a logistics-laden game like football would be next to impossible. I mean, you’ve got 100+ people involved on either sideline, you’ve got an extremely rigid schedule, so trying to pick up a game and restart it at a later date would be next to impossible. It’s bad enough trying to reschedule a game when bad weather or some other disaster comes up. And every scenario I have mentioned so far involved players going back out, even months later, and settling the result on the field. In the case of the Pine Tar Incident (unusual in that Brett being called out was the last out of the game), the Yankees still had a chance to bat in the bottom of the 9th and tie the score. In the case of the Duke-Miami game which is the source of this blog, there have been calls to somehow overturn the result, but what good would that do? Sure, the officials got the play wrong, but it most likely wasn’t the only mistake they made all night, it just happened to be the last mistake, one from which it was impossible to recover. And since they called 28 penalties in the game, 23 of them on Miami, you cannot say they weren’t involved in the game in any other way. They just missed this one, as inconceivable at seems. It happens sometimes.
I mean, the officials committing a game-altering mistake late on is certainly infuriating. Don’t get me wrong. We all remember Fail Mary, of course. That’s the single-worst call in the history of the NFL. As a Seahawk fan, I’ll freely admit we stole that one – while also pointing out that the Seahawks have also received several official apologies from the NFL over the years for poor officiating which directly played a hand in their losses, including in consecutive weeks in 2003, one of which involved a referee tackling a Seahawk receiver. (Fast forward to the 1:30 mark of this video.) But the NFL doesn’t alter results after the fact, which annoyed me a few times when it came to ’Hawks games, but they shouldn’t do it, and neither should anyone else. There still has to be a human element to the games, and humans make mistakes.
What’s particularly galling about the Duke-Miami situation is that it involved instant replay technology, and the whole point of the technology is to prevent precisely what happened on that play. Other than the electric eyes in tennis, no one seems to have figured out how to use replay correctly yet. A particularly awkward situation arose two weeks ago in the Rugby World Cup quarterfinal between Scotland and South Africa. Scotland led 32-31 mere moments from the end of the game when the referee awarded the Springboks a penalty, as the Scots were offsides when they handled the ball. The Scots wanted to somehow challenge the play, but even though rugby has instant replay available, it’s only for particular situations and this play didn’t apply. It got even messier when they showed the replay on the Jumbotron in the stadium as the Springboks lined up for a gimme penalty kick which would give them three points and a win, and 80,000 people in the stadium – including the players on the pitch – could see for themselves that the referee had gotten the call wrong. The Scots and the fans, somewhat understandably, were incensed, and South Africa won 34:32 on a bogus penalty on the last kick of the game. Rugby is a sport where dissent is no tolerated in the slightest – the referee’s rule is final is his authority unquestioned – but now it was entirely in the court of public opinion, and the poor guy got absolutely crucified in the press. It all begged the question: what’s the point of having replays at all if you can’t fix what’s so obviously incorrect?
To me, the burden of proof has always been applied wrong in replays. You shouldn’t be doing it based upon what was called on the field. The one empowered with the monitor should be able to use their own judgment. Most replay systems have been set up this way in part because there are particularly prickly umpires and referees unions involved, all of whom don’t like the fact that technology can do their job better than they can, and thus might eventually make them replaceable. But what’s most important, in the end, is that you get the call right, and nobody gives a damn who, or what, makes it. And if a sport decides to say the hell with it and go back to using only humans making decisions, that’s fine as well. Officials are doing the best they can, and we can live with the results.
And the fact of the matter is that controversies of the nature surrounding Duke and Miami are, in the end, good for the game. For one thing, it’s because of nonsense like we saw on Saturday that rules often get enacted, or fixed, to try and prevent it from happening again. And for a game so dependent upon pageantry and being in love with its own nostalgia as college football is, a play like we saw on Saturday, and all of the surrounding controversy, ultimately adds some color and spice to the mix. Football is unique in that there are so few games during the course of the season that every one of them is magnified. Because of this, it’s a game which easily lends itself to legend and narrative. I was speaking the other day online with Tim Williams from the law firm of Williams, Morgan, and Williams, the Unofficial Of Counsel of In Play Lose, and Tim is a Missouri alum. All that I had to do was mention “5th Down” to put him in a cringe. (He then mentioned the Nebraska kicked ball all on his own, which was noble of him.) It’s been almost 18 years, and Zzu Crew members like me are still irked about the 1998 Rose Bowl between The Good Guys and Michigan, when Ryan Leaf spiked the ball to stop the clock and the clock didn’t stop. In the larger picture of things, the greater the controversy at the end of the game, the greater the narrative becomes over time. The stories do get better as they get older.
And if a football team ever wins a game because of a 1-pt. safety, then I will have truly seen it all. But that will probably happen next week.
