Michigan needed a phantom second on the clock and a 47-yard prayer to slip past Western Michigan on Saturday night, and the actual score, 13-12, makes the same -27.5 line that had books feeling good about Week 1 look like a joke told at Michigan’s expense. Per ESPN’s box score, the Wolverines finished with 276 total yards and three turnovers against a MAC opponent that committed zero.
Western Michigan led 12-7 with 35 seconds left and had every reason to think it was about to be the story of the weekend. Bryce Underwood’s desperation heave sailed incomplete as the clock hit zero, which should have ended it right there. Instead, officials reviewed the play, ruled that a Western Michigan defender wearing No. 18 had touched the ball from out of bounds, and put one second back on the game clock, citing a rule most people watching had never heard of before Saturday night.
One second.
That’s the entire distance between Michigan escaping with a win it barely deserved and Michigan going home 0-1 to a team it was favored to beat by nearly four touchdowns. With the second restored, Underwood found JJ Buchanan on a 47-yard Hail Mary for the win, Buchanan’s sixth catch of a 126-yard night, and Michigan Stadium erupted in front of 110,879 fans who came expecting a laugher and left with a heist.
https://twitter.com/CFBKings/status/2096432838342062586
The internet did what the internet does with a finish like this, within minutes.
I watched most of this one on my third screen, mostly checking in on the Western Michigan side of it out of pure underdog sympathy, and I still sat up straight when the review dragged past a minute. Give Underwood his due: the throw was filthy, 47 yards on the money against a defense that knew exactly what was coming. Nobody in a striped shirt manufactured that part.
But Michigan needed a phantom second to survive a 27.5-point spread against a program from the Mid-American Conference, and that sentence alone should embarrass a team ranked No. 16 in the country. Twelve first downs to Western Michigan’s sixteen. Three giveaways to zero. Saved by six inches of foot placement that almost nobody in the building saw happen live.
The Big Ten backed its officials fully, saying a synced video review, using broadcast and clock cameras calibrated 85 minutes before kickoff, showed the defender’s left foot was out of bounds the instant he touched the ball. That’s the conference’s official position on the most controversial finish of the young season, delivered like a case that was never open to begin with.
National writers weren’t as forgiving.
One analyst called it the worst best ending in the sport’s history. Yahoo ran with “blatantly rigged” and “stealing a game” in the same headline, which is not the kind of language outlets reach for when a call is clean.
None of that stopped the celebration. Fans stormed the field, the band played “Hail to the Victors,” and Michigan partied like it had won a national title instead of surviving a MAC team by a single point it had to borrow from the officiating crew.
The Big Ten isn’t revisiting the call against Western Michigan, and nobody with actual power over the outcome has suggested otherwise. Michigan’s athletic department already showed this year it knows how to make a problem vanish, paying $7.1 million to make one go away quietly, so a one-second discrepancy against a MAC team was never getting a second look from anybody who matters.
Kyle Whittingham’s first game as Michigan’s head coach ended in a field storm for beating a 27.5-point underdog by one point. Welcome to Ann Arbor.
