North Texas @ Tulane

Tulane, not noted as a football powerhouse, is not high on my NCAA watchlist, but it was facing North Texas for the American Conference championship last night, so I tuned in. (Despite never having heard of the American Conference.) My father obtained his medical degree at Tulane and it’s where he first met my mother, so my presence on this planet owes something to that school, and my ears always perk up when the name is mentioned.

It was an interesting game, and rather fun to watch. NTU averages scoring 51 points per game. They scored 7, until Tulane sort of went to sleep with a 34-point lead and let them score 14 more. Sort of gifted them with a couple of touchdowns in the 4th quarter. The announcers were sort of gibbering because the game was not going as predicted and they’d had to throw their script out the window.

I hate football game announcers. They think they know more than the coaches, and keep telling the coaches what they should do. Fortunately, the coaches can’t hear them. Unfortunately, I can. The coach who wins the game almost never does what  the announcers told him he should do.

These announcers passionately wanted the game to get back on script and for NTU to start winning. They are smarter than the officials, too, and they kept calling penalties against Tulane that the officials did not see. I didn’t see them either. They got very upset that the officials didn’t listen to them and penalize the Tulane players.

There were two touchdowns by Tulane which the announcers claimed were not touchdowns because of a fumble or penalty. They screamed passionately during the replays that it had to be the way they saw it, and expressed profound disappointment when the officials did not call it their way. I was embarrassed for them, and I didn’t even like them.

What amazed me was that, in their passion to support NTU, they forgot the rules of football. (If they knew them in the first place.) Tulane punted, and kicked away from the single NTU receiver. The receiver was running toward where the ball was descending and ran into a Tulane player. The ball hit another NTU player and was recovered by Tulane. The officials awarded possession to Tulane.

The announcers immediately began screaming about “kick catch interference” and calling a penalty, returning possession to NTU. I promptly thought that, “No, the rule only protects a player in the act of catching the ball.”  They turned to their “rules analyst” expert, who confirmed that, yes, that absolutey, positively was a penalty for “kick catch interference” even though the receiver was running across the field when the collision occurred. 

I looked up the rule in the NCAA rule book and found that it says that, “the player must be in a position to catch the kick.”  When you are running across the field toward a descending ball, you are not “in a position to catch the kick.” To clarify the case, you are running toward such a position, but you are not in it.

Another case of partisanship overriding sanity?