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Six Thoughts On The Final Play From Oklahoma State-Central Michigan

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I’ve had some time to sleep on everything (not that that helped anything), but I’m back fresh with a few thoughts on the final fiasco that unfolded at Boone Pickens Stadium on Saturday afternoon. I already did my 10 Thoughts on the game here so I’ll limit these thoughts to simply the intentional grounding call and subsequent play of the year from CMU.

1. Gundy’s Big Gaffe

It still seems impossible that Mike Gundy did not know that intentional grounding would be called on Mason Rudolph. I wouldn’t even be as flummoxed if he thought it would be waived off because it was the end of the game (that I would sort of understand), but he seemingly thought it would not be called at all. Did he think the refs had a lunch appointment at Chili’s and had to get out of dodge? That they would look past the throw right at his mullet and simply “do the right thing”?

I’d like to know exactly what the thinking was here. And why Justice Hill is not running down the Cimarron Turnpike with the football as I write this with the final score of 27-26 Cowboys because he ran out the east end zone as time expired and never stopped. A lot of people will think about that play for a long time (Gundy included).

2. When did you know?

Everyone will have a different “this is when I knew … ” story 10 years from now. Here’s mine. I watch the games on the Fox Sports Go feed on my computer because you can rewind and fast-forward so I can cut GIFs and videos for you guys while the game is going on. It’s proven to be a really good resource for me in running this site. It’s how we were able to get the video of the last two plays up so quickly.

The problem is that the feed is probably 10-20 seconds behind the real-time feed so Twitter is sort of a mess during the game. I don’t really want to know what’s happening via Twitter, but it’s also helpful so I sort of keep it rolling but try to not look every two seconds (#firstworldproblems). So anyway, I have the feed up and I’m tweeting about things like this as CMU gets lined up for the play:

Then all of a sudden I see this tweet.

That was it. I didn’t know … but I knew. I knew what had happened. Mark Cooper is a Tulsa World reporter (and a good one), and I knew he was at the game and probably 15 seconds ahead of me. As soon as I saw the “M” in that tweet, I knew I wasn’t going to see my family for the next 12 hours. That was followed by a string of “OMG” tweets from other people before Twitter literally broke for me. Like my Twitter for Mac app literally did not work because of the traffic. Cooper Rush broke my Twitter.

Then the next tweet I saw, I’m not kidding, was this one:

It made me laugh a lot. The entire 20 minutes was insane. I was franticly Slacking Kyle Boone fire emojis and he was asking me legitimate questions like, “what do you want me to write about?” that I had no idea how to answer. I’ll never forget seeing that Cooper tweet. It was my “oh, Weeden just threw a pick in Ames, eh” moment of this year.

3. Mike Holder, boss

The strongest response of all came from Holder who called the entire thing “incomprehensible.” That’s the proper response from the proper person with enough distance from the situation. It would be difficult for Mike Gundy or any of the other coaches to take this stand because it would make them look whiney and weak. But Holder has the clout and the cachet to use these words, and he did so very well.

4. How Did Nobody Know the rule?

Carson Cunningham said this at some point in the insane postgame, but how did nobody associated with the Oklahoma State football program know that the CMU play at the end of the game should not have happened? I get that everything happened really quickly, but you would think someone in the organization would have radioed Gundy. From that point Gundy should have ran to the 50 yard line, signaled Larry Reece to hit the music and done The Gundy on loop until officials sorted everything out and declared the game and OSU the winner.

How great would that have been, by the way?

5. That Play Though

Can we talk about the actual mechanics of the play? It has to be up there with the Nebraska catch against Mizzou, the Tyrone Prothro and the Kordell Stewart play in Boulder against Michigan (these are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head) as one of the craziest plays of the last 25 years.

The pitch back hail mary is a play we used often in co-ed flag football. Nolan Cox (whose brother Mason is much more famous and likable) is 6’6″ and we used to run him to the corner of the end zone and just heave it up to him. The rule in co-ed flag football is that you had to complete a pass to a girl every other play (or something like that) but it would count if the girl caught a pitch back before Nolan’s feet hit the ground.

So we would throw him the jump ball, he would pitch it back to a girl and we would have our completion. It actually worked a lot. Except that we weren’t using it to beat a Big 12 favorite at home in September on an untimed down at the end of the most insane game many of us have ever seen. Other than that, basically the same.

6. What should happen?

I thought Berry Tramel’s column about how CMU should give the game back was interesting but not realistic or necessarily what should happen. Here’s the thing that really irks me — who is in charge here? We had statements from the Big 12, the MAC, the athletic directors and basically everybody weighed in except for a liquored-up Dan Beebe sipping a Mai Tai from a Caribbean hut (#buyoutlife). But does anyone know who has the governing authority to nullify or solidify a win? Is it one of the conferences? The conference whose referees were used? Bob Bowlsby? The CFP committee? John Skipper? President Obama?

It *should* be the NCAA. College football is too big and too important to not have a clarified governing body with a legitimate commissioner to make decisions like this. It’s insane that this is not a reality for what has become probably the third-most popular sport in the nation. It’s 2016, $932 billion is made on college football every year (approximately), and nobody actually knows who’s in charge.

Would it change anything if there was a centralized governing body that everyone knew was the centralized governing body? Probably not, but like OSU changed the college football playoff system, maybe it can help affect change here as well. It already has in some ways. As a buddy said to me in church this morning: “Well, it sucks for you guys. But at least you know it will never happen again.”

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