Pac-12 refs invent new way to screw WSU against Oregon
They tried to fix it, sorta, but
c’mon.
By Jeff Nusser Coug Center 9/25/2022
The Washington State
rallying cry “Cougs Vs. Everybody” has never been more apt than today, when
Pac-12 referees invented a new way to screw over the Cougars.
With 11:33 remaining in the 2nd
quarter and WSU leading the Oregon Ducks, 10-6, Cam Ward took an intentional
grounding penalty on 1st and 10 from the Oregon 41. The call came after much
deliberation as to whether Ward had been out of the pocket — he scrambled to
his left and made it to the edge of the tackle box before coming back to the
middle of the pocket and throwing it away, and the refs eventually determined
it was grounding.
Then things got weird.
As WSU came back to the line, you
can hear the official near a microphone shouting, “Third! Third!” Eventually
the graphic came up on the screen saying “3rd and 18,” and the announcing crew
of Tim Brando and Spencer Tillman just rolled with it, albeit hesitatingly.
Leading the game against a strong
opponent and facing long odds to convert, the Cougs called a draw on “3rd” and
long, which gained a yard. Then they punted (to the Oregon 5).
Wait ... what happened to 2nd down?
Did 2nd down just get ... skipped?
When the game returned from the TV
break after the punt, confusion reigned. After a multi-minute delay, it was
determined that 2nd down had, in fact, been skipped, which the lead official
announced to the crowd. The remedy: Everyone would just have to pretend that
the punt didn’t happen and go back to 3rd and 17.
But ... that doesn’t really solve
the problem: WSU forfeited 2nd down with a draw because they thought it was 3rd
and long, so now they have 3rd and long again?
The play call was exactly what you
would have expected:
“It messed with the flow of the game
and how we would call that situation,” WSU coach Jake Dickert said after the game.
Referees have a lot of things to
keep track of, but the most basic is the down. They have little rubber bands on
their hands to make sure they don’t screw it up. There are eight — EIGHT — of
them on the field. None of them realized the mistake? These are guys who blow
their whistle and huddle up for minutes at a time for the most mundane
infractions to make a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y sure they got it right.
Dickert did try to tell them:
“We knew the down was wrong, we told
them, and I think they said they were going to review it but they let the play
run,” Dickert said. “But I give them credit for, even after we punted – I don’t
know if I’ve ever seen that, after a possession to come back and run the play.
They got it right, they were dedicated to get it right, they admitted their
mistake and we moved on.”
We Cougs are used to garbage like
this, though: The “backwards” pass in the 2002 Apple Cup ... the non-PI call
against Oregon in 2014 ... Christian McCaffrey’s non-fumble against top 10
Stanford in 2015 ... the non-targeting call against Porter Gustin and USC in
2018 ... a penalty being assessed to the wrong team against Cal in 2019,
negating a huge kickoff ...
It gets to be hard to just call it
random incompetence when it pops up again and again and again to benefit WSU’s
high-profile — and more highly ranked — opponents.
