Would have been nice to have this a few days ago.
Over the past few days, one of the hottest topics in college football has been the controversial ending in the matchup between the Michigan Wolverines and the Western Michigan Broncos.
The Broncos, who compete in the Mid-American Conference, came into the game as 28 point underdogs. But they managed to give the #16-ranked Wolverines all they could handle in Ann Arbor.
The Broncos kicked a field goal with just 1:15 left on the clock to make the score 12 to 7, meaning Michigan needed to drive down the field to score in just over a minute if they wanted to avoid what would have been considered one of the biggest upsets in the history of college football.
With no timeouts left and only 9 seconds on the clock, Michigan was forced to throw a Hail Mary, which star quarterback Bryce Underwood overthrew, with the ball falling to the ground outside the back of the end zone after the clock hit triple zeros.
Western Michigan took the field to celebrate, but officials quickly announced that the play was under review. After a couple of minutes, the referee announced that there was actually one second left on the clock, meaning Michigan would have time for one final Hail Mary. And…well, we all know what happened next. This time, Underwood threw to the front of the end zone, Michigan scored a touchdown, and the Wolverines scored a walkoff 13-12 win as time expired (again), robbing us of one of the all-time great upsets in college football history.
After the absurd ending, the broadcast showed what was thought to be the official clock to confirm that time had expired after the first Hail Mary, and therefore Western Michigan should have won the game. But the Big Ten issued a statement claiming that, basically, there was another clock the officials used that showed one second left on the clock when the Broncos defender first touched the ball:
“Following video review, it was determined Western Michigan’s #18 started his jump from an established out-of-bounds position (left foot) and made contact with the ball with one second remaining on the clock. As shown in the provided video of what was viewed during the replay process, a side-by-side view of the play and the game clock, using a direct shot of the game clock in the stadium, was used to determine the final ruling.
Eighty-five minutes prior to the game, all broadcast cameras used for the replay system, including the camera on the game clock, are synced using a strobe system to ensure all cameras are aligned.
Per NCAA Football rule 4-2-3-a, ‘A ball not in player control, other than a kick that scores a field goal, is out of bounds when it touches the ground, a player, a game official or anything else that is out-of-bound [sic], or that is on or outside a boundary line,’ and thus the clock is stopped.”
Well at first, Western Michigan and the MAC seemed to accept the explanation, even if begrudgingly. But yesterday, the conference reversed course and asked the NCAA to recognize the Broncos as the winner of the game.
Unfortunately, the NCAA quickly shut down any suggestion of altering the outcome of the game. And according to this video, it looks like they might have got it right all along.
Zach Linfield, who serves as the PA announcer for Michigan’s women’s basketball team, shared a video he recorded of the final Hail Mary attempt – and it appears to confirm that there was one second left on the clock inside the stadium when the ball was first touched by out-of-bounds WMU defender Micah Davis:
Of course the footage, which was shot from the opposite end zone, is a little hard to see. But it’s the best look we got so far that appears to show that there was, in fact, one second left on the clock.
That brings up a bigger issue though: With so many cameras in the stadium, how the hell wasn’t there a single one (other than this guy’s cell phone, apparently) that caught both the scoreboard and the play on the field in the same shot? It feels like that’s something we would have the technology to do by now.
And it also calls into question the clock on the broadcast, as well as the whole explanation from the league about some super secret clock.
But again, this whole thing could have been put to bed if we only had a camera angle from where this guy was standing. Because in the year of our Lord 2026, apparently a Zapruder-quality cell phone video is all we have to settle one of the most controversial plays of the college football season.
