I Thought I’d Seen Every Kind of Sports Scandal. Then Came This Football Game Last Saturday.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. 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’s games? Almost happened, and probably would’ve if the state’s wildly foolish attorney general hadn’t made a destructive legal maneuver the day after Tech’s biggest booster sent his fundraising committee $274,000. 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. If you are a fan of the sport, you may become desensitized to these things. “Here we go again,” you may think, every time a new lawsuit crops up over the NCAA or some conference’s attempt to enforce basic rules like “You can’t bet on your own team” or “You can’t bounce between the NFL and college.” 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. 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 “winning” a game and an upstart from the Mid-American Conference “losing” what would’ve been its biggest triumph ever? Welcome to the perfect college football scandal of our time, now on Day 5 of its news cycle. I will quickly recap what happened: Michigan, a team that probably sucks this year because it has a disappointing quarterback and a leaky offensive line, was losing 12–7 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’s 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 13–12 victory. For a couple of days, the key stakeholders accepted what had happened. The MAC did not protest on WMU’s behalf, and the school’s head coach and president gave a gracious press conference. “I don’t discern anything unfair or untoward in this process,” 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’t go back in the tube. The MAC’s argument is that “established replay protocol clearly requires” the Big Ten to rely on the “program feed” clock, which comes out of NBC’s production truck. (This is the clock you see on TV.) The MAC says the Big Ten used a clock “embedded” in its replay system. It’s likely that they’re different displays of the same clock—but with a tech glitch somewhere that caused them to fall out of sync. Different people are not starting and stopping the game manually. 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, officials were already supposed to use the TV clock in moments of conflict, because it’s 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 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’t blame anyone for this, as I had also not considered that “the clock” was not a singular source of truth. Apparently it’s not, though. The Big Ten says that in its review, “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.” This does not explain why NBC’s clock, which at least theoretically mirrors the stadium clock, reached a different conclusion. There were also moments in the game when NBC’s clock and the one on the stadium video board did not match. You will go crazy if you try to sort this out. You just need to accept that “the clock” 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 “known discrepancy,” which I don’t find unreasonable given all the wires and airwaves and things involved with broadcasting a game. The MAC says there was “no ill intent,” and I agree, while accepting how hopelessly naive that will sound. 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’s 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’t written out? Should the Big Ten commissioner have stepped in to prevent Western Michigan from getting screwed? That’s 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, not to be the master of rules minutiae that aren’t even written down. 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 and call the sport “the Wild West.”) Michigan found one of the last remaining holes in college football’s written rules without even trying, and a MAC program with a fraction of their budget lost despite leading after regulation. Populism! 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’t 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’s conference and its business partners. That’s classic college football, too.