2009-09-04

You make the call

Okay, so here's the situation. BC Lions versus Montreal Alouettes, September 4th, 2009 in BC Place.

With 3rd and 1, and the ball on the BC 6 yard line, a first down for Montreal is more likely than not a touchdown gimmie. The teams line up, and the BC Place crowd is so loud that Montreal's O-line can't hear the calls from backup QB Adrian McPherson. In fact, its so loud that nobody can hear the whistle blowing that BC is calling a timeout (oh Wally Buono, you clever asshole). Montral makes the push, but the play doesn't exist as the timeout was called long before the snap, as confirmed by video replay. The 3rd down has to be redone. Okay fair enough, and you see that the loud crowd was exactly what Buono had in mind: let Montreal make their play.

Well, it was a giant mistake from the CFL's winningest coach. On the next play, 3rd and 1 with 1:00 left on the clock (recently reset from 0:58), Montreal hands off rather than pushes for the last yard, and runs into the end zone. It was 19-12 before the play... now Montreal has to decide to push for the 19-19 tie or try a 20-19 win with a 2-point conversion. Wait, there's a flag on the play, and the CFL has challenged the ruling...

...so it turns out that while TSN reset their clock to 1:00, the official clock was still 0:58. So now what would you say the correct call is?

Change the clock time from whatever it ended post-touchdown (ie. 52 to 54 seconds) to replace the missing two seconds? No, that's not it.

Reset the clock to 1:00, replay the 3rd and 1, and negate the touchdown? Absolutely! That's it man, you got it right there!

Okay, does anybody want to explain how this works? One of the basic rules in problem solving is that you pick the item that does the least harm to parties that had no role in the problem. Montreal had nothing to do with the clock being reset, so why is their play (which they only did in the first place because BC did an asshole trick by calling a timeout just before a play in a home environment with excessive noise) negated after the fact?