Welcome to The Football Notebook, the place where I spend entirely too much time thinking about college football officiating decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with any team I care about.
College football is officially in full swing, the Premier League and the rest of soccer are humming along and the NFL is preparing to join the party, which means we have finally reached the point on the calendar where there is simply too much football. It’s a glorious sight, isn’t it?
This past weekend, Michigan and Western Michigan produced one of the most infuriating endings I can remember, Manchester United found a new and creative way to drop points, Arsenal and Inter Milan reminded everyone why they’re champions and the supposedly underwhelming opening weekend of college football was anything but.
Oh, and UMass won a game.
There’s a lot to discuss.
Let’s open the notebook.
Western Michigan Was Robbed, and I Will Not Be Taking Questions
I still don’t understand what happened at the end of Western Michigan-Michigan, and several days removed from the incident, I regret to inform everyone that I am still extremely mad about it.
There are losses that hurt, losses that linger and losses that make you question why you ever decided to care about sports in the first place. Then there is whatever happened to Western Michigan on Saturday. The Broncos had Michigan beaten. Not figuratively. Not in some moral-victory, “they played their hearts out” sort of way. The clock hit zero after Bryce Underwood’s Hail Mary sailed out of the back of the end zone, Western Michigan began celebrating and head coach Lance Taylor threw up a W on the sideline. Ballgame. Drive back to Kalamazoo with perhaps the biggest win in program history strapped into the passenger seat.
Except it wasn’t.
Officials reviewed the play, discovered one additional second somewhere in the couch cushions and gave Michigan another snap. Underwood then launched another Hail Mary, JJ Buchanan caught it and suddenly a game Western Michigan had won became a 13-12 Michigan victory. The Big Ten’s explanation afterward centered on the official game clock and the clock displayed on NBC not being synchronized, which I suppose is technically an explanation in the same way that telling me my car exploded because the engine caught fire is technically an explanation. Great. Why did the engine catch fire?
