Little Danny;424572 wrote:I question ESPN's motives for doing this show. As pointed out above it was eight freaking years ago. Why don't they do a show about the questionable call last year in the Nebraska-Texas B12 Championship Game? Why single out this game? I understand the teams will match up again this year and ESPN is already building up the hype, but the fact is May and company have been talking about this for the past eight years.
I also agree with the pos that one can nit-pick calls in a lot of games and claim the outcome would have been different. As the old saying goes "If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle".
Little Danny, this was part of a series of "What if" plays that ESPN College Football Live is doing this summer. They are not just looking at this one call. They will be looking at other plays (not just penalty calls) and be asking "what if the play had gone the other direction." For instance, what if Matt Leinart didn't get the ball across the goal line against Notre Dame in 2005? Or what if Clint Stoerner hadn't fumbled against Tennessee in 1998? It wasn't like this was an isolated scenario that they chose to single out 8 years after the fact, it's part of a series they are doing looking at important plays in big games. They are doing it because it's fun to look back several years after something happens and wonder how the landscape of college football would be different today if the outcome of one single play were different.
With this they explained that had Miami won they would have carried their win streak into the next year and played Oklahoma in the title game, leaving LSU out, and since LSU didn't win the title in 2003 Saban doesn't jump to the NFL then, which had a trickle down effect which led to Les Miles ending up at Michigan, Saban eventually ending up in the NFL, Bobby Petrino ending up at LSU, and Rich Rodriguez ending up at Alabama. Obviously we have no idea if any of this would have happened, but it's fun to look back and speculate about how things could have been different if one play went the other way. This segment really wasn't about whether or not the right call was made, but rather how things could have been different is Porter hadn't thrown the flag.