Notre Dame Cheated

Cheated of victory, I mean. I have no dog in this hunt, except for a general Catholic cultural preference for Notre Dame (or Boston College, or any other Catholic school with a decent football team) to win, especially over Behemoth U. Various friends have been lamenting the university’s loss to Florida State Saturday and having out of sympathy watched the play, linked from one of my friend’s Facebook laments, think the team really was robbed.

You can find the play here. The writer gets it wrong, appealing to a picture as the play has already started developing — which, despite what he says about it, could easily be argued shows defensive pass interference. The video below the picture shows the whole play.

Notice that the inside of the two receivers accused of blocking rather than running their routes is jammed by the defender at the line of scrimmage, who holds him with his hands the whole time and then pushes him down at the end. He seems to be starting to cut inside when the defender grabs him. Arguably defensive pass interference. The outside receiver is actually cutting back to the middle of the field when the defender jumps in front of him and pushes him. Again, arguably defensive pass interference.

And what happened to the defender who’s supposed to be covering Corey Robinson, the guy who caught the ball. He’s running across the field well behind Robinson and then pulls up when he gets to his teammates holding up the two receivers. He would have been too late to stop Robinson even had he not had this knot of players in his way.

Notre Dame was running a simple play. The two receivers cut to the middle. The other, lined up slightly behind them, runs right, having a head start on the defender marking him, who if things work will be slowed down by the two receivers and two defenders moving towards him. The play worked. Only it didn’t, because the receivers got blamed for the defense’s physical tactics.

Notre Dame was cheated of an impressive victory.