He’s lucky the NCAA hasn’t fixed its site selection problem. Had they been playing at Notre Dame rather than the Sugar Bowl, he would probably freeze on his long walk home.
I liked the first round of the playoffs being played on campus. IMHO, ALL playoff games should be played on campus. Flip a coin. Whoever wins the flip hosts the game.
And that would mean a fair share of games being played in northern locales, in real football weather. Which they should be.
When I was a sideline photographer I witnessed a similar situation where a ref ran into a long lens, going full speed.
The lens was ripped from the camera body, wrecking both of them. And it wrecked the photographer who had their nose up against the camera.
That was close to a $10,000 mistake. And the ref didn’t blink twice.
Every other person looked down at the line and made sure we took half a step back. We only had to see that once.
Part of the problem with this is that the athletic department insist on having as many people on the sideline as they could to sell the support appearance. When you bring all the redshirts, reserves, special teams like practice offenses and defenses and past players and place them on the limited sidelines while they are mixing with the actual players that move on and off the field, that’s a lot of people right there. A team can dress 55 players and have up to 85 on the active roster. With the addition of athletic staff to record the games, sideline officials for the sticks, coaches, wiring, television cameras and reporter staff, and all the others that were there by invite or working, that amounts to a lot of people in a limited space. It was crowded. For all we know he may have been knocked forward but it didn’t recognize to him. He was wrong, but it is a shared blame. I’ve officiated NCAA and National Federation and it happens more than people know. And when a number of people cross into that zone to complain about a call or congradulate a player, warranted or not, it can get crowded. The officials associations I worked with don’t want to call that but it was on national television and it did deviate the side judge’s path cutting his ability to keep up with the play.
wy69
Does the article ever get around to mentioning what the headline says?
So the lesson learned is, don’t sweat winning the conference championship, if you know you’re already in.
That seems to have worked out for Texas and Penn State. And Ohio State and Notre Dame didn’t even have to bother with a conference championship game.
It also appears that the “bye week” wasn’t much help.