Every time I put a question mark in a headline I feel the need to genuflect towards the ironclad rule created by David Betteridge, and after the last weekend of college football, you can make a strong case it applies here too. I wrote before how a Lubbock judge conveniently ruled that the local Lubbock football team could add the top quarterback in the transfer portal, even though he violated the sanctity of sports and NCAA rules by betting on games played by teams he was on, which was something of a preview of this college football season. The backlash to Texas Tech’s cynical Brendan Sorsby signing eventually chased him out of the Big 12 and to next year’s NFL draft, as schools like Georgia issued memos saying they would not schedule schools like Texas Tech in any sport should they suit up someone who so blatantly violated NCAA rules just because a hometown judge wants to see his team win.
Which brings us to last Thursday night. While I was I was losing my ever-loving mind watching my decrepit alma mater shockingly dismantle a Rutgers team kind enough to throw us a post-game fireworks show, a Shreveport judge ruled that the local college football powerhouse can play players who attended NFL rookie camps earlier this year. Lane Kiffin, LSU’s new head coach, has made a name for himself successfully exploiting every edge this lawless land allows, and he has pushed the envelope yet again as to what “amateur” athletics actually means. LSU eviscerated Clemson on Saturday night, and Kiffin’s perpetual success in this sport is a pretty good summary of where it is, spiritually speaking.
But Kiffin was not the story of Saturday night; that was another behemoth of college sports up north. B1G giant Michigan was fresh off a scandal where they had to dismiss coach Sherrone Moore after the university found he’d had an inappropriate relationship with a staff member and lied about it–and then, hours after the firing, got arrested at that staffer’s house. They hired Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham and hoped to turn over a new leaf this season, but opened it struggling mightily against my alma mater’s fellow MAC school, Western Michigan, for 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Or 60 minutes depending on which clock you want to believe.
On NBC, who is reportedly paying the B1G $350 million a year through 2030 to broadcast 14 to 16 Big Ten Saturday Night games a season, the clock clearly showed that Michigan’s hail mary was still in the air at zero NBC seconds before the Western Michigan player touched it. Per everything the B1G’s broadcast partner had on hand, the game was over and Western Michigan had staged the second shocking MAC over B1G upset of the week.
Here’s my Michigan-WMU Zapruder breakdown
— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 9:14 PM
But it wasn’t over. B1G video review officials put an extra second back on the clock, and NBC’s rules official and former NFL referee Terry McAuly was mystified. This gave Michigan a second hail mary attempt, which you can see in the titular photo was caught by JJ Buchanan, turning a humiliating 12-7 loss into an even more humiliating 13-12 win, where Michigan students initiated the most pathetic and shameless field storming in college football history. I was also a young and stupid college student once, and I promise any of you who rushed the field that in 10 years, none of you will confess in public that you were even at that game.
But the video the B1G released along with the 100% real text below they presumably hijacked from a 1985 Stephen King novel shows the refs got it right. There was one second left on the stadium clock when the Western Michigan player touched the ball. Because he jumped from an out of bounds position, the play is dead as soon as he touched it. Per video review’s look at it, this was the correct call. Michigan did deserve another play.
The B1G provided video showing a second left on the clock when the ball was touched by a WMU defender
— CJ Fogler (@cjzero.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 10:57 PM
[image or embed]— Dan Weiner (@danweiner.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 10:51 PM
⏱️ A Big Ten replay worker showed fans 0:01 on the clock during the disputed Michigan–Western Michigan ending.
Should broadcasts show viewers the same angles replay officials use?
— The Majors Ann Arbor (@themajorsa2.bsky.social) September 6, 2026 at 6:50 AM
But why wasn’t NBC’s clock synced to the official game clock? Why didn’t McAuly get a look at that video replay review so he could tell viewers the NBC clock was wrong? What the fuck is the point of even putting a clock on your multi-centimillion-dollar broadcast watched by millions if the official clock running alongside the play is hidden in a tent somewhere, and only a handful of people can see it? A lot of people will argue that this secrecy proves that the B1G manipulated the video to save a flagship school from an embarrassing home loss, but I highly doubt that video review system on the sidelines you see in the last video has live editing capability, and even if it did, the charlatans who run college football have proven they probably are not capable of pulling off that kind of deception in real time. As shady as this situation with the most confusing hail mary of all time looks, I think this is very likely a never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity situation. All you see these days in college football from the people running it is rank greed and/or shameless incompetence.
Which brings me back to my title and the evidence I have presented for Betteridge’s case. What is an NFL player defined as under NCAA rules? What does violating NCAA rules even mean if a team can just get a local judge to say they are very special boys and girls? Does the NCAA have any enforceable rules a judge can’t overturn on a whim? What is time, exactly? Every season, we learn that more and more of what we fans thought was sacred in this wonderfully beautiful and stupid sport is actually negotiable depending on the kind of power you can wield over it.
This is an existential crisis. What the NCAA gave SMU the death penalty in 1987 for has long been the seedy underbelly of all college football, and part of the immense power of the local car dealer in America. The new NIL rules bringing that dynamic into the open have been good for player empowerment and a move in the right direction to compensate America’s most exploited sports class, but the lack of contracts or rules or anything resembling a shared set of values has defined the NIL era by college football’s most cynical actors leaning all the way into their worst instincts. Now Nick Saban is stumping for laws that dehumanize trans people during commercial breaks under the guise of supposedly saving a sport whose cynicism he benefited from in two major power centers of college football. Lane Kiffin, who was hired by Saban at Alabama, is one of the kings of this sport both because he is a true football genius, and because college football resembles him. The only rules that really exist are the ones that get punished, and in a Shreveport courtroom last week, Kiffin yet again proved that the NCAA’s rules are more like suggestions if you can attack them from the right angle.
This will not end well. Michigan and the B1G can scream until they’re blue in the face, which probably won’t help the B1G’s case that they are an impartial ruler here, that the official game clock did show one second left, but we didn’t see it. We saw zeroes and then they released video of the official game clock about two hours after the game had ended even though some drunk college kids rushing the field saw it immediately afterwards. College football’s coaches, administrators, and broadcast partners are consistently revealing these days that college football is run by fundamentally unserious people who have proven they are not up to the task of properly running a multi-billion dollar sport. They are children playing with toys and demanding to be taken seriously when they royally fuck up in front of the entire world. It’s just one big cash grab, and no one running this sport has proven they care one iota more about the fans or players than the next dollar they see over the horizon. It’s insulting that they still try to keep up that charade in light of the now weekly indignities suffered by college football fans trying to argue that this sport is not degenerating into professional wrestling.
We don’t even get to see the official clock until after everyone has driven home and gone to bed. Judges get to build college football rosters now. Lane Kiffin’s cynical theory of college football has proven to be true. The game is so far gone from even the days of SMU’s death penalty that I don’t know how it comes back without a serious crisis that calls the game’s fundamental integrity into question. Games inundated with gambling ads being increasingly decided by off-the-field factors feels like we are in the beginning stages of some kind of turning point right now. Unless the sport deviates from this track, eventually, a tipping point will be reached where fewer people will tune in to watch these games being decided by administrative fiat, and networks like NBC will pay the titans of college football less money to broadcast their bastardized version of the sport where they can’t even be bothered to make sure the people watching it know how much time is left.
Everywhere you look right now, the basics of sports are being neglected as pure greed is closing in, desperate to cook the golden goose, certain that it will not fundamentally change anything for our deranged capitalist masters. Lots of people use sports as an escape to get away from the world’s problems, but our collective societal collapse is also breaching these hallowed halls, proving yet again that sports have always been political.
