What just happened? Did Michigan get a judge to add one second to the game?
I’ll be honest, it’s been kind of an underwhelming week 1 of college football, with a ton of blowouts and not many marquee matchups. LSU versus Clemson was billed as the game of the week but so far Lane Kiffin’s team has absolutely dominated the other Tigers, and aside from Boise State giving Oregon a scare, most of the top 25 won their games in massive blowouts. (I’m also salty because both of my alma maters lost today and looked pretty bad, so I was already not in a good mood before this latest mess just happened).
The game of the week has, surprisingly, been #18 Michigan taking on Western Michigan in Ann Arbor tonight. It was generally a snoozefest, with Michigan looking absolutely terrible under new head coach Kenny Whittingham.
Of course the program was kind of a dumpster fire when he took over in the wake of Sherrone Moore being fired and arrested following the 2025 season. And quarterback Bryce Underwood didn’t do anything last year to justify the $12 million in NIL money that he’s being paid to play for the Wolverines. But for some reason, Michigan was still ranked inside the top 20 coming into the season, so the fact that they only managed to score one touchdown in the first 3 quarters (really the first 4 quarters) of the game came as a surprise…even if it maybe shouldn’t have.
Anyway, Western Michigan went into halftime down 7-6 after kicking two field goals in the first half, and then managed to kick two field goals in the fourth quarter to take a whopping 9-7 lead.
The Broncos kicked their final field goal with just 1:15 left in the game, meaning Michigan needed to drive down the field to score in just over a minute if they wanted to avoid one of the all-time embarrassing upsets in college football. And with no timeouts left and 9 seconds on the clock, Michigan was forced to throw a hail mary, with the ball falling to the ground outside the back of the end zone as time expired…or so we thought.
As Western Michigan began celebrating what would have been an incredible upset of a MAC team over what’s supposed to be a Big Ten powerhouse, the refs suddenly announced that the previous play was under review.
The broadcast reviewed the final play, confirming that the clock hit zeroes before the ball left the back of the end zone. Western Michigan had won the game. Until the Big Ten referees came back and announced that they were putting one second back on the clock, giving Underwood and Michigan one more shot at a hail mary.
Well guess what happened…
Michigan scores the touchdown and walks off with a 13-12 win, saving their season and causing Wolverines fans to embarrassingly storm the field…for beating Western Michigan.
The problem, though, is that even going by the official clock, it was abundantly clear that the clock had hit zeroes and the game should have been over after the first Hail Mary.
Western Michigan won the game in 60 minutes, but somehow, the refs decided that this game should last 60 minutes and 1 second…and that 1 second gave Michigan the win.
And as you can imagine, the internet immediately erupted:
Absolutely insane. Even Whittingham appeared to admit that there was no time left on the clock before the final play:
It’s an embarrassing result not only for the Big Ten, but for a week 1 of college football that really needed an upset like that after so many blowouts earlier in the day.
Unfortunately, the Big Ten refs robbed us of it.
