{"id":842523,"date":"2026-09-10T04:22:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T04:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842523\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T04:22:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T04:22:16","slug":"michigan-football-college-footballs-latest-scandal-might-be-its-most-absurd-one-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842523\/","title":{"rendered":"Michigan football: College football\u2019s latest scandal might be its most absurd one yet."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Lately, college football has featured a torrent of legal fights that border on the surreal. Texas Tech wants to play a quarterback who habitually bet on his own team\u2019s games? Almost happened, and probably would\u2019ve if the state\u2019s wildly foolish attorney general hadn\u2019t made a destructive legal maneuver<\/a> the day after Tech\u2019s biggest booster sent his fundraising committee $274,000<\/a>. LSU wants to play a couple of players who had just signed NFL contracts, causing the SEC to vaguely threaten to kick one of its most important members all the way out of the league? It was on the table until Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you are a fan of the sport, you may become desensitized to these things. \u201cHere we go again,\u201d you may think, every time a new lawsuit crops up over the NCAA or some conference\u2019s attempt to enforce basic rules like \u201cYou can\u2019t bet on your own team\u201d or \u201cYou can\u2019t bounce between the NFL and college.\u201d But fortunately, this week, the Big Ten and its multibillion-dollar media conglomerate partner, NBC, have elevated the art of college football scandal to a genuinely new frontier: the nature of time.<\/p>\n

What is the clock? Is it real? Is the thing you just saw with your eyes something that really happened, or is it a mirage? And is there any remedy when this distortion of our shared reality ends with one of the blue-blood brands of college football \u201cwinning\u201d a game and an upstart from the Mid-American Conference \u201closing\u201d what would\u2019ve been its biggest triumph ever? Welcome to the perfect college football scandal of our time, now on Day 5 of its news cycle.<\/p>\n

I will quickly recap what happened<\/a>: Michigan, a team that probably sucks this year because it has a disappointing quarterback and a leaky offensive line, was losing 12\u20137 to Western Michigan with nine seconds left on Saturday. That underwhelming QB, Bryce Underwood, then ran around for a second and haplessly heaved the ball through the end zone as the game clock displayed on NBC showed 0:00. But the Big Ten, which was officiating its own team\u2019s game, looked over the footage in its replay command center and compared the tape to a clock that showed 0:01 at the moment when the ball went dead. The Big Ten went by their internal clock instead of the one the whole world saw and gave Michigan one last snap at 0:01. This Hail Mary was answered, and Michigan was awarded a 13\u201312 victory.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For a couple of days, the key stakeholders accepted what had happened. The MAC did not protest on WMU\u2019s behalf, and the school\u2019s head coach and president gave a gracious press conference. \u201cI don\u2019t discern anything unfair or untoward in this process,\u201d the president, Russ Kavalhuna, said. But the conference kept digging, and on Tuesday it released an updated statement that asked the NCAA and College Football Playoff to treat the game as a Western Michigan win. The NCAA said no, because toothpaste can\u2019t go back in the tube.<\/p>\n

The MAC\u2019s argument<\/a> is that \u201cestablished replay protocol clearly requires\u201d the Big Ten to rely on the \u201cprogram feed\u201d clock, which comes out of NBC\u2019s production truck. (This is the clock you see on TV.) The MAC says the Big Ten used a clock \u201cembedded\u201d in its replay system. It\u2019s likely that they\u2019re different displays of the same clock\u2014but with a tech glitch somewhere that caused them to fall out of sync. Different people are not starting and stopping the game manually.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, we may never get this settled. According to an official I talked with on Tuesday and this good story in the Athletic<\/a>, officials were already supposed to use the TV clock in moments of conflict, because it\u2019s not good for trust when millions of people are told they saw something that did not match the governance of the game. But none of this was codified in writing until Tuesday, when the NCAA released updated rules of the road<\/a> explaining when to follow each clock presentation. This newly written policy would prohibit what the MAC says the Big Ten did on Saturday night, but the Big Ten said it stood by its work and would have no further comment. The NCAA football rulebook is thick, but it turns out that the refereeing community had not explored every possible crevice of a football game. I don\u2019t blame anyone for this, as I had also not considered that \u201cthe clock\u201d was not a singular source of truth.<\/p>\n

Apparently it\u2019s not, though. The Big Ten says<\/a> that in its review, \u201ca 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.\u201d This does not explain why NBC\u2019s clock, which at least theoretically mirrors the stadium clock, reached a different conclusion. There were also moments in the game when NBC\u2019s clock and the one on the stadium video board did not match<\/a>. You will go crazy if you try to sort this out. You just need to accept that \u201cthe clock\u201d is not the source of truth you, reasonably, thought it was before Saturday. There are many clocks, even as there is only one clock keeper. The Big Ten commissioner says there is a \u201cknown discrepancy,\u201d which I don\u2019t find unreasonable given all the wires and airwaves and things involved with broadcasting a game. The MAC says there was \u201cno ill intent<\/a>,\u201d and I agree, while accepting how hopelessly naive that will sound.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Alex Kirshner
\n College Football\u2019s Biggest Gambling Scandal Also Reveals How to Prevent It
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The episode is befitting of our political moment in ways that would seem heavy-handed if a TV writer came up with them. But it\u2019s also a fitting college football problem because of its collective-action nature. Whose job was it to make sure all the clocks were on the same page? Whose job was it to tell the video reviewers that they were grading off the wrong rubric? Was that actually their job, anyway, given that the protocol wasn\u2019t written out? Should the Big Ten commissioner have stepped in to prevent Western Michigan from getting screwed? That\u2019s probably the best place to land, but then again, his job is to negotiate TV deals and pervert the College Football Playoff into a 24-team monstrosity<\/a>, not to be the master of rules minutiae that aren\u2019t even written down.<\/p>\n


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I Thought I\u2019d Seen Every Kind of Sports Scandal. Then Came This Football Game Last Saturday.
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Every problem that people complain about in college football stems from hundreds of people not being directly, singularly responsible for addressing it ahead of time. (This is why so many powerful people like to throw their hands up<\/a> and call the sport \u201cthe Wild West.\u201d) Michigan found one of the last remaining holes in college football\u2019s written rules without even trying, and a MAC program with a fraction of their budget lost despite leading after regulation. Populism!<\/p>\n

The whole thing has been absurd, embarrassing, and at least a little entertaining to those not emotionally invested in Western Michigan football. The scandal is also unresolvable, because sports leagues cannot be in the business of retroactively flipping the results of settled games. There is no other form of justice for Western Michigan. Should the Big Ten clean out its officiating office because nobody reached the likely correct interpretation of the rules, which weren\u2019t written in stone anywhere? At best, Western Michigan could receive some special consideration from the College Football Playoff selection committee in a few months, if the Broncos have a good enough season to be in the hunt. This was a system breakdown, not a nefarious plot, but the outcome was familiar: a little team facing the consequences of the work of the Big Ten\u2019s conference and its business partners. That\u2019s classic college football, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[2662,399,1303,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-842523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-sports","tag-football","tag-michigan","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}