OSU vs. Michigan — The Spot Game: Three Plays for the Win

OSU vs. Michigan — The Spot Game: Three Plays for the Win

by Grant Burkhardt

It had already been a chaotic three-and-a-half hours at The Shoe on Saturday, and even then there was still overtime to play. Ohio State scored in two plays to open the first extra period — the easiest 25 yards it got all day, on an especially difficult one — and Michigan needed fourth down to equalize and force a second. Then the Wolverines got the ball to start the second overtime and kicked a field goal to lead 27-24. You know all this. You were watching. The next possession is one worth revisiting, though.

It’s a favorite saying of Frank Solich, the football coach of Ohio University, The School Down South, that yards get easier as the game goes along. Ohio State’s final possession was that saying’s antithesis. Facing third-and-nine – and not exactly wanting to have Tyler Durbin kick a 40-ish yard field goal with the day he was having — the Buckeyes turned to Curtis Samuel. Now, as we’ve said before in this space, Samuel inexplicably and frequently ghosts. He goes without a touch for quarters at a time, and until getting the ball on that third down, Samuel had touched the ball nine times in the game. 

But he had it, needing positive yardage, and yet there he was going backward. Right, back, left, back again, left again. All the while poor, tired blockers were scrambling to give him some room — any room — for forward motion. All the while fans on couches and in the stands leaned on each other as if the field was tilting and so were their living rooms. Those plays, those all out scrambles, are the ones that make even neutral fans hyperventilate. But Samuel found a crease and somehow fell forward for eight yards. 

The risk of going backward on that play was enormous. Durbin had already missed from 37 yards and from 19. If Samuel had been tackled behind the line (by a Michigan defense that had been in the backfield all day), who knows what would have happened. Anyway, in reality, Samuel got the eight yards and set up fourth-and-one.

Perhaps it was the way the cameras captured the action on my television, but those final three plays – and the time in between snaps – felt like complete chaos. You had the stakes of the game, obviously. You had Urban Meyer, surely in some form of cardiac distress, flailing his arms to try a quick-snap on fourth down. There were Wolverine defenders flying around the field trying to get into position for that quick snap. And that was before someone on Michigan’s coaching staff sprinted up the sideline and called a timeout. Frantic, the whole thing. 

If you ask me, a hint of chaos, of anarchy, is what turns good sport into great sport. So, that fourth down call, with J.T. Barrett stopped just before or just after the first down line — depending on what color you’re wearing — was blissful scandal. You sit there, letting the moment wash over, agonizing over the call, knowing no matter what the outcome that it’s a forever-type of moment. The lack of camera angles (how is that possible?) was an assist for Ohio State, and when Samuel ran it in a play later it cemented this game as the Spot Game. 

And now for Ohio State, a waiting game. The Buckeyes are likely to make the College Football Playoff regardless of any of this weekend’s results, but there’s a chance that the selection committee could set a precedent that conference championships are more important than a team’s final record. If that happened, two of either Washington, Oklahoma, or the winner of the Penn State/Wisconsin game could knock out Ohio State altogether. But that’s for next week, and the Buckeyes have done what they could. They needed almost four hours, but they did their part.

No matter what you thought of the call, that fourth down call sucked so much air out of the rest of the narrative (and out of Michigan’s defense, apparently), that it’s easy to forget that I’ve only written about three plays. Three plays that happened to be the last 75 seconds of a wild game, one full of chaos and intrigue, and one not easily forgotten.

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