SI:AM | Looking Back at College Football’s First Replay Controversy

In today’s SI:AM:

Western Michigan-Michigan fiasco recalls a similar ruckus 86 years ago

On Tuesday, the Broncos started a fight that appeared to end as quickly as it began. Belatedly capitalizing on days of favorable public opinion, the Mid-American Conference appealed to the FBS Oversight Committee to overturn the result of its 13–12 loss to Michigan Saturday. By NCAA standards, the response was swift: The committee had no jurisdiction to take Wolverines quarterback Bryce Underwood’s Hail Mary off the board.

College football’s power brokers refusing to reverse questionable finishes is not new. In the mid-2010s alone, a Miami victory over Duke on a circus lateral play and a Central Michigan game-winning Hail Mary-and-lateral against Oklahoma State were allowed to stand despite egregious officiating errors—both of which were more straightforward than what happened in Ann Arbor, Mich., Saturday.

The awful truth is that there has been just one instance in college football history of a refereeing never event being wiped out wholesale, and for it to happen, two teams had to take the law into their own hands.

The date: Nov. 16, 1940. The combatants: No. 2 Cornell and Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. In the final minute of a tightly contested battle, the Big Red—a team that had not lost in more than two calendar years—drove inside Dartmouth’s 10-yard line trailing 3–0.

First-and-goal from the 6-yard line: a three-yard gain. Second-and-goal: two more. Third-and-goal: no gain. Fourth-and-goal: Cornell halfback Walt Scholl’s pass to the end zone falls incomplete. Dartmouth ball … or so you would think.

Actually, the game’s officials miscommunicated, and there was no replay system to check their work on the spot (the first college football game had been televised a little over a year prior). And so the Big Red found themselves scouring their playbook for a fifth-and-goal play—a Scholl pass that didn’t miss this time around.

Final: Cornell 7, Dartmouth 3. Until veteran referee Red Friesell—soon, per Time, to receive mail addressed to “Fifth Downer, U.S.A.”—watched film of the final sequence on Sunday. Contrite, he contacted the head of officiating in the East, and when informed of Friesell’s error, the Big Red decided to concede the game. To this day Dartmouth is recorded as the winner; Cornell lost to Penn the next week and never again truly contended for a national championship.

“Today, if anybody followed [Big Red coach Carl] Snavely and [university president Edmund Ezra] Day's honorable lead, especially with the multimillion-dollar BCS pot of gold on the line, it's likely they'd be hung—not in effigy, but in person,” ESPN’s Beano Cook wrote two decades ago.

Yes, it’s hard to imagine Michigan wiring Kalamazoo, Mich., and admitting defeat. Small gestures like Wolverines running backs coach Tony Alford’s classy congratulations to the Broncos—and AP Poll voters yanking Michigan from the Top 25—will have to suffice, unless Western Michigan is planning on going to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland.

There’s always a danger in romanticizing days of yore, especially in college football. Yet let’s take a moment today to remember a moment of true grace in sports. They were rare then—there’s a reason this story has stood the test of time—and they are rare now.

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The top five…

… moments from a crowded day of tennis.

5. Credit to Jessica Pegula for digging deep and eliminating Emma Navarro in the Net Worth Derby—watch her second set-winning point here.

4. Aryna Sabalenka’s own three-set quarterfinal victory feels like it happened one million years ago.

3. USWNT forward Trinity Rodman was as fired up as one can be at that hour.

2. 3:33 a.m. ET. I was sound asleep, and most of you probably were, too.

1. A nice little American moment between Frances Tiafoe and Alex Michelsen after the former won a five-set epic. Friday’s all-American semifinal on an emotional day in New York will be a sight to behold.

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