I don’t even know how to be trying to explain this. To be honest, I’m a little too gobsmacked to actually put digital pen to digital paper. You try not to be a prisoner of the moment in this business, but you can watch a lot of football and never see something more head-scratching than how Miami lost its game against Georgia Tech. Sometimes just the cold facts tell the story.
The play clock in college football is 40 seconds. Unlike on a failed fourth down (which causes a change of possession), when you go down inbounds on any other down, the clock continues to run. So if you were a college football team and you were winning the game, and the clock had ticked down under 40 seconds and your opponent didn’t have any timeouts, the only thing you’d have to do to win the game would be to kneel out of the victory formation. This is as close to an unassailable fact as there can be in the sport. It’s literally why they call it the victory formation.
But Miami did not do this, dear reader. Instead, inexplicably, they decided to run the ball up 20-17, and the absolute worst case scenario happened. They fumbled …
... and the Jackets pulled a miracle to win the game after going 74 yards in 25 seconds to win the game, capped off by this:
Mario Cristobal gave no explanation for it at the end of the game because there is no explanation for it. It is as bad of a blunder, if not worse, than you will ever see at this level of football. And Cristobal’s staff has at least had something close to this back in 2018 when he was the head coach at Oregon and a similar situation happened. Had his Ducks kneeled, they would have gotten the clock down to around 10 seconds and their opponent had no timeouts. This time was somehow orders of magnitude worse.
There are three quotes ringing in my head constantly in the wake of this. The first one, I heard for myself earlier today. Steve Sarkisian said it after his Texas team lost to Oklahoma.
“That ultimately is a lot of what football is: Two good teams play, when one team makes a mistake, can you capitalize on that error?”
The answer, unequivocally for the Jackets in that moment was yes. The other? Apocryphally attributed to baseball manager Casey Stengel:
“Most ball games are lost, not won.”
The third comes from center Matt Lee, in a deeply upset state on the bench as he realized his team had likely lost:
