You Be The Judge – Was The "Missed" Field Goal That Virginia Tech Lost to Pitt on Last Night Actually Good?
Your guess is as good as mine. It always makes me laugh when people can be SO SURE they know better than the ref standing in the perfect spot to make the call. Not that I wouldn't trust a random Twitter account's eyes over the ref's. College Football simply never gives us a trustworthy angle.
That's what I normally think in situations like this. The person best positioned to see it clearly is the person who made the call. So fuck it. What choice do we have but to take their word for it? Sure, we get that one awkward angle from below the goalpost. The one that always seems a little bit off to the side. But even from here, I don't see how anyone could be 100% convinced.
In a situation like this, our only hope is that some Good Samaritan watching the play in person happens to catch the perfect video:
Well, shit. That's pretty good. It's still not perfect. Not even close. But boy… no wonder the home crowd reacted as if they won the game. I'd have thought the same. When you put together the angles we've seen so far, I'd be pretty upset too if I were a Hokies fan.
On the other hand, if I were a Pitt fan… the rule does say if the football is higher than the uprights, the whole ball needs to be inside of them. So from this angle, the question would be, "At what point in this video has the ball traveled far enough?"
As if me drawing straight lines on PowerPoint proves anything. I can hardly tell if my lines follow the path of the upright well enough.
Then we have this slightly blurrier angle from beneath the goalpost that appears to be taken from someone's phone in their living room. This clip makes the kick look even more in.
But that video almost looks like it was filmed off a TV screen from a low angle. I can't help but wonder if we have a reverse Big Head Joe Buck situation on our hands there.
I couldn't even tell you if Reverse Joe Bucking would help or hurt a Virginia Tech fan's case. I'm just saying… the waters are muddy. If it's my team, or a team I'm betting on, I'm convinced it's good. If I'm on the other side, I'm convinced it's not. And if I don't care about either team, I get to sit here and write my blog like the crown prince of objectivity who's humble enough to realize that sometimes we simply can't know things for certain. And that's ok.
Except it's not, really. The real thing to be upset about is that, for some reason, we refuse to use the proper camera angles or develop technology that could tell us DEFINITIVELY whether a kick is good or no good. I know we could have it if we wanted to. I've seen way crazier cameras being used in soccer than would be needed for this.
I don't know if it's Big Referee holding us back because they don't want to be caught looking bad. But that doesn't make much sense, because if we did have something we could rely on, we'd only be saving them from themselves.
Instead, these refs live at the mercy of whoever in the crowd, on the sideline, in the Goodyear Blimp, what have you, who happens to post the best angle on the internet.
God damn it. Ok, that's the best one. It has to be. Now I'm pretty sure he missed again. Do you see why we can't trust that stupid under the goalpost angle? It's almost completely useless.
Hell of a game otherwise, though. I really thought Virginia Tech had it. I was pulling for them. I'm not much of a James Franklin guy, but I'm not much of a Penn State guy either. It would have been pretty funny to see the coach they fired mid-season take their team to 5-0 on the same Friday Penn State gets boat-raced by Northwestern.
College kickers, man. They'll take years off your life.