The Bail Mary: Did The Big Ten Rig A Game For Michigan?

We have a massive college football conspiracy on our hands.

The Wolverines, in danger of losing to a Western Michigan team they were supposed to beat by four touchdowns, chucked up a Hail Mary. It may be the most scrutinized play in football this decade.

Log on to any social media, and you’ll find countless people posting screenshots, comparisons, frame-by-frame analyses and claims of expertise. The “Bail Mary”, as it has come to be known, has broken the Zapruder barrier. It’s getting the same treatment as the Holy Roller or Tuck Rule. 

Outside of draft analysis, my engagement with football is exclusive to the pros. I’m certainly not a Michigan fan, nor am I a Michigan anti-fan. I have no dog in this fight. Honestly, I find both sides of Michigan-based discourse annoying. I kind of hope a meteor takes us all out before we talk too much more about Connor Stallions or Dave Portnoy. 

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And yet, I am absolutely fascinated by this clock operation situation. We suddenly have the nation learning in real time about clock operation rules, video conversion methods, frame rates, monitor refresh rates, scoreboard brands and TV synchronization. 

I can’t help myself. I have to deep-dive into this. Please send help to my location.

[Editor’s Note: If you see Luke crashing out about football, do not intervene. He is exactly where he wants to be.]

So let’s go over the facts of the case. Prior to Michigan’s first Hail Mary attempt, Michigan spiked the ball on 1st and 10. Head referee Jim Wharrie ruled that nine seconds remained on the game clock and had the clock operator reset the clock to that number. That is an important detail, as the scoreboard operation does not deal in decimals (more on that later). No fractions of a second to consider.

On 2nd & 10, Bryce Underwood heaved a prayer to the back of the end zone, where safety Micah Davis batted it to the ground. As Davis stepped out of bounds prior to jumping for the ball, the play was dead the instant the ball touched him.

Upon review, the officials determined that dead-ball moment happened with one second remaining. They put one second back on the clock and lined up for a final down. This time, Underwood found J.J. Buchanan in the front of the end zone for the walk-off touchdown.

After the game, despite protests from the NBC broadcast, the Big Ten released a statement justifying the call.

The MAC has accepted this explanation, ensuring that no further action will be taken. 

But that won’t stop it from being one of the biggest topics of the week. It puts a ton of scrutiny on the Big Ten’s process for determining game time, tracking it, and applying it to their replay process. Did the Big Ten fabricate evidence to cover their asses? Were sportsbooks involved? Prediction markets?

According to the Big Ten’s statement, the entire roster of camera feeds is synchronized using a strobe system. That is ostensibly an external reference system: show all of the cameras a quick flash so they have a clear reference to anchor their synchronization.

One of those cameras is pointed directly at the game clock. The game clock is purportedly used by broadcasts when examining delicate timing matters like this, and is also what is used by replay officials.

Chase Snyder, a CBS Sports production assistant and Houston-area play-by-play announcer, showed one such camera from a different event.

The score bug, however, does not rely on this visual information. In the older broadcast days, they’d simply overlay the clock on the score bug. 

Ah, heck, watch the rest of the Miracle at the Met. It’s good for you.

Anyways, at a certain point, broadcast networks embraced full-score bugs. In doing so, they found ways to get reliable score and clock data directly from the official scoreboard, rather than having to point a camera at the ugly numbers. This NFL Throwback documentary breaks it down.

Score bugs are now wired directly into scoreboards, but can still be unreliable. Between broadcast delay, graphics rendering, and just general technological unreliability, it’s absolutely possible that the score bug slipped out of sync at some point. In fact, it took just one more day for a broadcast’s replay system to fall out of sync.

When the clock operator reset the clock to 9 seconds at the start of the 2nd-down play, however, any desynchronization would necessarily be fixed. The scoreboard, official game clock and TV broadcast were all set to exactly nine seconds. 

In fact, that’s key to the argument that one former Michigan staffer, whom I’m sure everyone wants to hear from on this, made:

That’s not how that works, however. According to this explanation from a scoreboard operator, there are two different kinds of scoreboard: decimal and absolute. You might see a decimal scoreboard in a basketball game, for example, using tenths and even hundredths of a second.

Michigan uses an absolute value scoreboard. So that extra 0.99 seconds that Stallions is referring to, which would be sufficient to claim that there was time left on the clock, would have elapsed before the 4th quarter moved from 15:00 to 14:59. 

That means we are working with eight seconds of game time, not nine. That is remarkably confusing and counterintuitive, but if we’re trying to determine if Big Ten officials were correct to put more time on the clock, we’ll have to work with that.

0:00 is the key moment. The problem is, we don’t have a camera angle that shows this play with the scoreboard clock in frame. So we have to rely on the synchronization of multiple cameras, superimposing the clock onto the play. That is where the issue is supposed to be.

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This system is remarkably reliable, which is why Terry McAulay was adamant that the clock is synced.

I suppose it's plausible that a glitch could cause the TV graphic to go out of sync over the last nine seconds, thus displaying the wrong time. Simply taking a screenshot like this won’t be sufficient.

The broadcast then used a different clock feed — an old-school cropped overlay of the stadium clock. This is what NBC’s producer confirmed was in sync. Either the producer was wrong, or the wrong call was made.

The Big Ten's official stance is that the producer was wrong. 

Attached to the Big Ten’s official statement was the release of the internal officiating conversation, including the above screenshot. That is a direct shot of the scoreboard at Michigan Stadium, as evidenced by the statistical display to the right of the clock.

Per the Big Ten’s release, their clock was twelve or so frames behind NBC’s, or ⅕ of a second. That was enough to make the difference.