As part of the ongoing, feeble efforts to stem the crimson bleeding from the Hats-for-Tats Scandal at THE Ohio State University, the Buckeyes announced that they will vacate all of their wins from last season, and give up their share of the Big Ten title.
What does this mean? There’s the statistical meaning (more on that later) and there’s the deeper question of what it means. Bear with me here: there’s a story that I hope will help you see what it means, or at least what it means to me.
My second-best friend from college, Michael, was getting married at a tony country club in Michigan. (Don’t worry: he won’t be offended by the penultimate appellation. He knows that my best friend from college is my wife.) Being a country club, there was a bar adjacent to the dining area, and being a Saturday in fall, the televisions in that bar were tuned to college football. For reasons that remain mysterious to me (and which I attribute more to his complicated relationship with his Catholic upbringing than he admits) Michael is a Notre Dame football fan. Always has been. He’s an Illinois alum and loves Illinois football, but he loves Notre Dame football in a way that makes me gag. But I love Michael like a brother, so I semi-tolerate this.
As luck would have it for Michael, there was a Notre Dame game on that evening. After getting updates on the score throughout the evening, it was shaping up to be a phenomenal game, and there was no way he was going to miss the ending. So he snuck off to the bar with the rest of us very-wasted groomsmen to catch the end. That’s right: he ducked out on his own wedding reception to watch the end of the game.
Oh, by the way: it was October 15, 2005, and Notre Dame was playing USC. The game was incredibly hyped: both teams were ranked in the top 10 in the nation at the time, and USC was the defending national champion (more on that later).
Notre Dame lost. Michael set a record for the saddest I’ve ever seen anyone on the day of their marriage to a wonderful woman (hi, Randi!). But it wasn’t just that Notre Dame lost, it was how Notre Dame lost. Die hard college football fans know where this is going. After the lead of the game had changed hands several times in spectacular fashion, in a now-infamous and still-controversial ending, the game was decided in the final seconds when USC’s quarterback, Matt Leinart, was pushed from behind by a teammate into the end zone, sealing a come-from-behind victory for USC in South Bend. The deciding play has come to be known as the “Bush Push,” because the pusher was Reggie Bush. Yes, that Reggie Bush, the professional football player.
And there’s the catch. As it turned out, Reggie Bush was (for all intents and purposes) a professional football player at the time of the Notre Dame game. The Heisman Trophy winner, it was later learned, had received numerous improper benefits while in college from people hoping to do (more) business with him once he (publicly) turned pro. Like the suit that he wore when he accepted the Heisman. And some slightly larger things, like a house for his family to live in rent-free.
So, after a long investigation, on June 10, 2010, the NCAA stripped USC of a number of victories in which Bush had played after becoming ineligible as a college athlete, including a national championship and the aforementioned Bush Push game.
So, those games that USC had previously been recorded as winning go down as losses for USC. But they don’t go down as wins for the opposing team. So, USC officially did not win the 2005 BCS championship game, but that doesn’t mean that credit goes to Oklahoma. It just means that, officially, no one won the BCS championship that year. Same with Ohio State and their games last season, including the OSU/Illinois game: Ohio State doesn’t get official recognition for winning the game, but Illinois doesn’t get credited with a win, either.
So, I asked Michael whether it means anything to him that USC did not officially beat Notre Dame on his wedding day. He says it didn’t. And I can understand that. It’s hard to explain exactly why it doesn’t matter, but it cuts right to the heart of why we watch sports.
Watching sports is a strange but ultimately ineffable experience, and for a lot of people, the thrill comes from watching the game live and experiencing the game as it unfolds. A number of my die-hard sports fan friends say they absolutely cannot watch a sporting event if it’s recorded (Read Chuck Klosterman’s very detailed exegesis of potential reasons, logical and illogical on why this is). There’s a tangible feeling that watching the game live makes the viewer a part of the game. As though maybe, if you want it bad enough, you can even influence the outcome. Watching a game after it’s decided is, to many, a bland or even disheartening experience: whatever the result was, it already happened, and to find out later makes plain that the result of the game did not, perhaps could not, have any profound impact on the viewer’s life or well-being.
So why watch?
Watching a game in the moment is different: Michael’s wedding is the most extreme example of this that I’ve ever seen. Loving a sport or a team is gambling, except you do it with your own emotions instead of money. (Don’t bet on college sports — there’s no money in trying to predict what 19 years olds are going to do). The risk/reward, the highs and lows of traditional gambling: it’s all there. You step away from your own wedding reception to watch a college football game not because you need entertainment, but because by putting your own heart into it the result might actually make you happier.
So, for so many fans, whether USC technically won the game is a moot question. According to the NCAA, a team doesn’t actually win a game unless it both has the highest score at the end of the contest and has complied with all of the rules along the way. USC unquestionably had the former, but not the latter. If you win a college game with pro players, you didn’t win a college game. You cheated.
But for the fans, the team that won the game is the team whose fans experienced that jubilant, fleeting high that we all gamble for: that indescribable elation when our team, your team, “we,” wins a close or otherwise great game. In that sense, USC did win the Bush Push game. Ohio State did beat Illinois last year.
No matter what a team does to itself, or the NCAA does to a team, there is no sanction that can rectify a rules violation that results in the wrong group of fans feeling that feeling. Rewriting the historical record as to the win-loss record can’t change that.
And that breaks my heart. I really wish there was some way to do that. For Michael. It was a beautiful wedding just the same. But it should have been perfect.