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 …
