The infamous 5th down

huskerdude171

Five-Star Recruit
Well I watched the last drive of the 1990 Colorado - Missouri game, so it reminded me of this. I was too young to experience the controversy or watch the game or anything, and I had heard of it before but never really looked into it before. So I was watching and the plays went on those final 5 downs: Spike, 3 yd run to the 1 yd line, the play where the CU back gets stuffed at the 1, the 2nd spike (which was actually 4th down), then the "TD" run, where it didn't even look like the guy got in.

My question is, how could a group of officials be that incompetent? I thought I had seen some bad calls, like the OU - Oregon game, but this one is so bad its disgraceful to college football. Then CU went on to when a "national championship" in a game where a game winning punt return for ND got called back. How could 1 team (especially a team I hate like CU) get so much luck from the refs? Why did they get the national title when they went 11 - 1 - 1 and they were in reality 10 - 2 -1? If that happened to NU, they could go undefeated and not win the national title (In the days before the BCS). And also as I was watching the game, the announcers didn't realize that they were given a 5th down. I mean WTH?

 
Yeah, thats messed up. CU's pride and glory is a fraud.

The same thing happened about 70 years ago. 5 downs sorta deal. The team (like CU) was given a chance to forfeit since they should've lost (it was the same exact situation) and they decided to forfeit. CU's excuse was that the "Field conditions were sloppy"

 
That is a disgrace to let the worst team in college football win a national championship from the refs and have such a sh**ty team.

 
huskerdude171 said:
Well I watched the last drive of the 1990 Colorado - Missouri game, so it reminded me of this. I was too young to experience the controversy or watch the game or anything, and I had heard of it before but never really looked into it before. So I was watching and the plays went on those final 5 downs: Spike, 3 yd run to the 1 yd line, the play where the CU back gets stuffed at the 1, the 2nd spike (which was actually 4th down), then the "TD" run, where it didn't even look like the guy got in.

My question is, how could a group of officials be that incompetent? I thought I had seen some bad calls, like the OU - Oregon game, but this one is so bad its disgraceful to college football. Then CU went on to when a "national championship" in a game where a game winning punt return for ND got called back. How could 1 team (especially a team I hate like CU) get so much luck from the refs? Why did they get the national title when they went 11 - 1 - 1 and they were in reality 10 - 2 -1? If that happened to NU, they could go undefeated and not win the national title (In the days before the BCS). And also as I was watching the game, the announcers didn't realize that they were given a 5th down. I mean WTH?
In the modern era we won National Titles when we went undefeated. As for Colorado that whole game was bizarre, Mizzou did something to the field that turned it into an ice rink. Colorado's excuse at the time wasn't the field but that they called plays based upon down and distance and were unaware of the extra down, which is possible because coaches will tell you all the time, including myself, you look at the down marker and the chains on every play to determine down and distance and then call a play. Their real luck was how many teams lost the final 2-3 weeks of the season and how they vaulted upwards. I just took a look at their schedule that year and they were ranked 14th on October 20 and managed to jump up to #2 by November 17th, that is almost unheard of lately because you do not see that many teams ahead of you lose in the last month. Their big jump was when the beat us on November 3rd, they were #9 and we were #2 and obviously we lost.

 
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