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Infamous Fifth Down Game that Inspired 5th Down College Football Website was a Brouhaha for the Ages

Mark Schipper

By Mark Schipper


This site—5th Down College Football—takes its name from a disaster Franklin Roosevelt would have called the second-greatest infamy of the twentieth century, just behind the surprise bombing of the fleet at Pearl Harbor back in '41. This second, slightly lesser known cataclysm happened at the tail out of a hot, loud, and slippery Saturday at Faurot Field in Columbia, Missouri.


The outrage, as many called it, came to fruition through a series of minor incidents and major errors so confounding in their cumulative effect that the wildest chaos theory ever authored could not have forecasted it.


“One of the most mind-boggling break downs in officiating we have seen in years,” was how CNN described the chaos that night on their national broadcast coverage of the mayhem at Mizzou.



In the end seven Big 8 Conference officials would be suspended indefinitely for the collapse in order they had overseen. One team would lose a game it had rightfully won, while a second team, apparently fortune’s favorite friend, continued down a predestined course to championship glory. What is known to history as the 5th Down Game, played Saturday, Six October 1990, between the Universities of Colorado and Missouri, was so bizarre in its unique details and yet, in its general sense of semi-surreal havoc, so perfectly representative of the mercurial sport that is college football, that it has eased into its place amongst the astonishing annals of a game that counts one-off oddities almost without beginning and end.


But the 5th Down Game, after all these years, would have shrunk back to an insignificant local anomaly, a semi-arcane asterisk for old conference rivals to argue over had its benefactor, Colorado, finished the season with a 4-7 record like its victim, Missouri, had in 1990. Instead, the Buffaloes went on to win the national championship, knocking off the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 10-9, in the Orange Bowl Classic on New Years Day-night in Miami, thus guaranteeing that the baffling end-of-game sequence in Columbia would live on in lurid detail for as long as the game is played.

DOWN IN MIZZOU


Several hours after Colorado had defeated Missouri, 33-31, scoring what may have been a phantom touchdown on the game’s final play—a 5th Down snap that should not have happened—a gentle, kindly-looking man named Rich Montgomery pulled over his vehicle at the top of an entrance chute onto Interstate-Seventy West, shouldered open his door before lurching out, and vomited onto the side of the roadway.


Montgomery had not been drinking all afternoon under the heavy October sun, though it is likely he would have taken a drink at that moment, but had just been told, by way of the post-game radio broadcast, that he had been a key figure in the absurd drama that cost his alma mater a massive upset victory in a major college football game.

Montgomery had served that day as the ‘box man’ on the chain gang, the individual charged with flipping the large, orange-numbered down markers atop a seven-foot signal pole that gets toted up and down the sideline to mark the line of scrimmage. Montgomery erred in not changing the down after a play had been run, an automatic act for a box man so elementary that this would have been an outrage at a Pop Warner football game.


If Montgomery had not been an alumnus of Mizzou, and a fanatical Tiger’s partisan with vanity plates on his car that read BGTIGR, an investigation into game-fixing and the underworld’s wire chatter out of Kansas City and Chicago would have been launched that day by the Justice Department.

Rich Montgomery, a good sport, holds up a non-existent 5th Down signal pole in a recent photograph.

Montgomery, fairly certain that he was done vomiting, peered back into the vehicle where his son, who had walked-on at Missouri’s football program less than a decade earlier, looked out at him in horror. The son was in his first year volunteering with the chain gang and had been amidst the sound and fury all day alongside his father. These were not exactly the Custer brothers at Last Stand Hill, but at that moment the mistake must have felt just as fatal. Montgomery the elder sank back into the car and drove home to Kansas City to await the fallout.

But Montgomery’s role, and his personal level of fault in this tragi-comedy, were not as simple as all that, because that Saturday, in the final, heavy turbulence of an all-out battle, a surprise set of waves had crashed down heavily over the end-of-game sequence, and swamped it.


A SATURDAY TO REMEMBER

The overarching reality is that the Buffaloes and Tigers had played the hell of a football game, everything that makes college football an almost-mystical and mesmerizing spectacle. The big crowd, full of an unsullied belief in the possibilities, had arrived early, filling the fifty-thousand seats and packing the steep grass embankment of Rock-M Hill beyond the north end-zone, turning the surrounding grandstands into a kind of Mizzou-heavy, black-and-yellow cubist mass.

Photo of Faurot Field and the famous Rock-M (not taken during 1990 game being examined).

They were animated by that unique kind of Saturday hope, the one which allows a passive spectator to contribute heavily, by way of perpetual shouting and powerful telekinetic energies, in the home upset over a mighty and heavily-favored conference rival. The organic and ecstatic revelry that commences after victories under those conditions, for those who choose to participate, fills the weekend with a kind of untouchable joy that cannot be generated in any other way.

The Buffaloes in 1990 were that program to beat, a nouveau dreadnought fighting out of the Rocky Mountains, built up over the preceding decade into a stylish and deadly serious national championship contender. They were a menacing squad to behold, wearing black jerseys with big, white-block numbers and COLORADO in capital letters across the chest. They wore gold helmets decal’d with a black, charging American buffalo and an interlocked CU branded through the center. Their primary pants were gold, but at home they had begun wearing black to go with their black jerseys, which gave them the look of marauders.

Colorado's Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam in 1994 wearing the Buffaloes' signature all-black.

Colorado had gone undefeated through the 1989 regular season, marching 11-0 through the autumn campaign before being stopped by Notre Dame in an Orange Bowl upset, which turned back the Buffs at the gates of Valhalla. In those days the Miami Hurricanes played their home games at the Orange Bowl stadium, and they had planted an evil eye to protect their sacred hunting grounds while they were away. The Hurricanes in 1989 were approximately halfway through an NCAA record fifty-eight game home winning streak, and the Buffaloes may have been hexed by it. Miami, a one-loss team to end the regular season, had shipped to New Orleans and throttled Alabama at the Sugar Bowl, which meant they returned to Florida hoisting what should have been Colorado’s first national championship trophy. It was Miami's third title in the now-concluded decade.


Boulder, Colorado was a nice place to go to school.

With Colorado's record at 3-1-1 after a ferocious five weeks to open the 1990 season, which left the Buffs in danger of falling off the national title track, the game at Missouri looked like a break. The Tigers were unranked and stuck at the back of the pack in the Big 8 Conference. The Buffaloes had run an all-out, 49-3, stampede on the Tigers the year before in Boulder and expected a similar outcome in Columbia. But, instead of the widely predicted wood-shedding, that loud, stoked-up crowd at Faurot Field inspired a spectacular performance from the home team behind its second year head coach Bob Stull.


The scoring shots between the schools went back and forth in sensational fashion:


Missouri opened the scoring with a nineteen-yard touchdown strike to take an early lead. Colorado countered on its ensuing drive with a 29-yard touchdown gallop to tie the score at 7-7. Mizzou countered the counter with a scintillating 59-yard touchdown pass that put the Tigers back up by seven. But the scoreboard had barely flashed the update when Colorado struck back with a 68-yard touchdown on a wide-receiver reverse that took the game to half at 14-14.

The second-half caught hold of the same live wire:


Colorado kicked a field goal to start the proceedings and moved ahead, 17-14. But Mizzou was not ready to cede the field and answered with a 13-yard touchdown run to go back ahead, 21-17, which held through the end of the third quarter. But Colorado's potent offense struck back to start the fourth, piercing the Tigers' defense with a 70-yard touchdown strike that put the Buffaloes back ahead, 24-21, with thirteen minutes to go.

The scoring summary, in this case, did not tell the whole story.

The Tigers stayed game in that final period, splitting the uprights on a long field goal on their next drive to tie the thing at 24-24. The teams then traded punts for almost eight minutes until, with the hour growing late, the Buffs marshaled a drive that ended with a field-goal to squeeze back ahead, 27-24, with just 3:41 to play.


It was at that critical moment that the Tigers daggered Colorado with a 38-yard touchdown pass that put them up 31-27 with just 2:32 left to play. Missouri, with the way its defense had played in the fourth quarter, had put itself in prime position to end the Buff’s national championship campaign right there, while launching something special of their own.


That was how matters stood when everything went plaid.


The Buffaloes' offense, with its to the death championship pedigree, worked quickly down the slippery artificial turf at Faurot Field and into scoring range. But, trailing by four, they needed touchdown to win the game. That slippery playing surface, a track condition incongruent with a hot, dry day in Missouri, is something that needs to be expanded on.


Back in 1985 Missouri had rolled out a brand of fake grass known as Omniturf to cover its football field. While it had earned a reputation as the worst playing surface in the Big 8, on some Saturdays, because of the carpet’s physical and chemical composition, it performed worse than its already low baseline. Omniturf had been optimized for damp-weather, with a heavy sand base beneath the plastic grass that soaked up water and created a strong, sticky track when the ground was wet. The University of Oregon had played on Omniturf for years in the Pacific Northwest, for example, and received few complaints because the engineering matched the autumn climate.


But at Faurot, with the sun blazing overhead, the sand would heat up, loosen, and expand underneath the hard-plastic grass, making the field more like an asphalt parking lot dusted with loose gravel than a natural-turf field. Of course, this was not really a problem so long as you did not want to plant a foot at high speed and change directions. Fortunately for the athletes, this was a technique used only several hundred times over the course of a normal football game.


"That field was awful," said Mike Ringgenberg, a Missouri linebacker in 1990. "I don’t care if you played on that field day in and day out, practiced on it, played on it. Your footing didn’t get any better. You just learned to slip and get back up."

Colorado in particular, because of its option-heavy and misdirection-dependent offense, needed its ball handlers to plant a foot hard and go on every snap. The Buffaloes later estimated, after watching game film, that their players had slipped and slammed down onto the turf no fewer than ninety-two times over the course of the game.

During that final Colorado drive, with the game and the chance to continue pursuing a national title on the line, the television broadcast crew began taking unvarnished shots at the field conditions. After one of the Buffaloes’ wide receivers had lost his footing and crashed down on a play in which he would have been wide open, play-by-play man Les Shapiro became incensed.


“Maybe they should rip up this turf, the way everyone is falling down on it,” he said. “How frustrating is this if you’re a C.U. Buff?”


Colorado head coach Bill McCartney, a former Missouri player who had helped battle the Tigers into two Orange Bowls in the early 1960s, would go ballistic over the field after the game.


“The biggest story is not how the game ended, it’s that field,” McCartney shouted, red-faced, and bug-eyed during the press conference. “That field is glass. That field was not playable."


Mike Pritchard as a star player for Colorado in 1990 and scored two long touchdowns against Missouri, but even he had difficulty keeping his feet on the slick Omniturf surface.

The field conditions, fittingly, would catalyze the chain reaction that guaranteed the game’s infamy. With thirty-one seconds to play Colorado completed a short pass to their tight-end, John Bowman, at the four-yard-line. As Bowman turned toward the goal there was nothing but green plastic turf in front of him, marking the path to an easy go-ahead score. But as he planted his foot and turned toward the end zone it was exactly like he had stepped on a patch of loose gravel; his legs went out from underneath him and he slipped down to the ground.

“Bowman, if he keeps his footing, he scores easily and the game pretty much is over,” said analyst Dave Logan to the television audience. “Colorado has just had the devil of a time trying to stand up today.”

“This turf is an embarrassment,” said Shapiro. “If I was voting on a most valuable player I would give it to that stuff.”

“For the first time ever,” was Logan’s sardonic reply.

Instead of a sure touchdown and a likely Buffaloes' victory, it was first-and-goal from just outside the three-yard-line. With one timeout remaining and half-a-minute on the clock, the cold hand of fate settled its icy grip over the assembly.

Charles Johnson, the Buffaloes' quarterback, rushed the team to the line, took the snap and spiked the football to stop the clock. The free spike was a new rule in college football. Whereas in the past a quarterback would have to attempt a real-looking pass, stepping back to throw the ball forward and out of bounds, bleeding an extra two or three seconds off the clock, the rule had been changed so he could fire the ball directly at his feet to accomplish the same purpose.


But the tradeoff to this tactic, as always, was that it cost the offense a down. With the newness of the rule, and the intensity of the moment, the first inklings of confusion crept into the game. The broadcast crew, for just a moment, was not sure if it was first or second down after the spike.

“Second down,” said Shapiro, ominously foreshadowing the ensuing tumult. “No, first down, and goal-to-go for the Buffs.”

It was second down, but that critical error had not yet been made on the field. While Shapiro was confused about the down burned by the spike, the chain gang was not. Down on the field Montgomery and his box—standing alone at the three-yard-line—showed an orange two for second down.


Montgomery standing by himself was another crucial ingredient in the foul broth that was coming to a boil. The Big 8 was testing another first-year policy, one in which the other members of the chain gang stepped away once it became first-and-goal inside the ten-yard-line. The rationale was defensible: The chains no longer were needed and the fewer bodies packed into that compressed space the safer everyone would be. The logic was solid, but the tradeoff was that two fewer sets of eyes would be monitoring the game as it related to down and distance.

Colorado snapped the ball and ran its second-down play, a handoff to running back Eric Bienemy that sent the stout, speedy athlete into the middle of the line. He hit the turbo boost toward the end zone but slammed into a picket of Missouri defenders who halted the charge and dragged him down just outside the goal line. At that moment a Colorado lineman rushed into the face of head referee J.C. Louderback and called the Buff’s final timeout.


There were eighteen seconds left in the game and the down, at that moment, should have been flipped to third.


But as Louderback stopped the clock he looked up and saw Colorado’s coach, McCartney, waving him to the sideline. Louderback, without signaling to Montgomery to flip the down to third, trotted over to give the coach a hearing. And Montgomery, at the moment he would have taken the signal from Louderback, or asked another official if he was good to make the change, was staring across the field and up into the grandstands behind Colorado’s bench. It was eighty degrees at the end of a three-hour battle—the game at that moment reaching a pitch of intensity that has to be experienced to be believed—and someone’s heart had given out in the stands.


There was a melee about twenty rows up from the forty-yard-line and sideline paramedics were racing into the stands. An elderly, heavy-set Missouri fan had collapsed into the row of people in front of him at the moment Bienemy was stood up at the goal line. Several people in the surrounding rows, recognizing immediately the signs of heart failure, had begun CPR until the paramedics could climb the stairs.


The paramedics loaded the man onto a stretcher and rushed him down to the track where they could work on him with all of their equipment. Montgomery stood watching this desperate scene as the timeout came to an end. That poor fan died on the track behind Colorado’s bench surrounded by a thunderous stadium that was largely oblivious to his personal tragedy as the increasingly surreal chaos played out.


“I’d like to say I wasn’t distracted,” Montgomery said years later in an interview with ESPN. “But even most of the Colorado [bench] players were turned around and looking.”


While all of that was happening, Louderback was in parlay with McCartney, who wanted to explain—so the referee would be prepared—what Colorado was going to do to end the game. Everywhere McCartney looked it said second down, so he took the signal pole, the scoreboard, and the referee at face value, telling Louderback his team had a three play sequence—a run; a spike to stop the clock; and a final run—to close the proceedings.


McCartney, critically as it turned out, admonished Louderback to not let Missouri players lay on top of his guys and bleed out the clock before they could get up and spike the ball. Louderback told him not to worry about it, he would not let it happen.

Up in the television booth the broadcast crew was speculating on the frantic conversations they could see taking place down on the field.

“I think the chains are wrong on the field,” said Logan, the analyst. “I don’t think it’s second and goal. They had second and goal before, I don’t think it’s second down now.”

“I was a little confused by that myself,” said Shapiro, the play-by-play man.


“They threw the pass down to stop the clock on first down,” said Logan, recalling that first play of the final sequence.


“Yes, you’re right, that’s right. It’s third down,” said Shapiro, which indicated that the television crew was locked-in on the actual scenario.

“But that won’t matter,” said Logan, making a rational but serious miscalculation. “You won’t have time to run three plays. You’ve got time for two plays here, and I’m sure that’s what Bill McCartney is telling his guys.”


Jay Leeuwenberg was Colorado’s center, a position often held by one of a team's more cerebral players. Fittingly, Leeuwenberg stood in the center of the sideline huddle during the timeout. He had warned McCartney that it was third down, no matter what the marker said, and if they spiked the ball after the following play it would be on fourth down and the game would end.


McCartney, full of that bolt-rattling tension that consumes a head coach at the climax of a tight game, with veins popping out of his head and neck as he shouted over the jet-engine roar of the crowd, turned an intense set of eyes on his future All-American lineman and shouted: “Shut up, Leeuwenberg! Play center!”

There was nothing to say after that, the die had been cast.


Louderback—who was working with an officiating crew that he had met just that morning—did not have the beats worked out with his fellow referees. That camaraderie and familiarity are critical components of quality referee work and his crew had not had time to build it. When Louderback jogged to the sideline to hear out McCartney, none of the other officials had stepped in to change the down marker or remind Louderback to do it.


As the teams trotted back onto the field the box on top of the signal pole said second down. The scoreboard said second down. The head referee believed it was second down. And Colorado was running an end of game sequence predicated on it being second down. Of course, it was third down, which was a situation that a fast-growing contingent within the stadium was starting to realize. These people were making their way down the stairs and out onto the perimeter of the field to shout this fact at the oblivious referees.


Bob Stull, Missouri's head coach, later said that he felt something was going haywire with the downs but he had de-prioritized it. Stull had the disposition of a squad making its desperate last stand to concern himself with, and he put his trust in the controls. Fourth down, 5th down, 10th down, the Tigers had to make a stop.


"In the heat of the game I can much more easily see a scenario where the teams and coaches lose count, but not the officials," Stull said the next day. "I’ve seen plenty of instances where the coaches make a mistake with the downs and the officials have complete control of the situation."

Colorado snapped the ball and sent Bienemy over the top, where he was met in a crackling head-on collision and knocked straight downward, if not even a yard backward. It should have been 4th down from the one or two-yard-line with the clock ticking implacably toward all zeroes.


With bodies all over the field, and Mizzou players moving with conspicuous sluggishness to stand up, Louderback minded what McCartney had said and waved his arms to stop the clock. This act was almost unprecedented in itself. The clock runs after a tackle in bounds and, while a referee might stop it for a second or two in extreme situations, Louderback held the stoppage for six full seconds as Colorado maniacally scooped up its own players and the referees put the fire to Missouri’s defenders to stand up and line up.


Finally, with the clock frozen at eight-seconds, Louderback cut it loose. The Buffaloes lined up and spiked the ball—on what should have been 4th down—with two seconds left in the game.


Logan up in the broadcast booth had been right. If Louderback had not stopped the clock there would not have been time for even a second play, let alone a third. But here was Colorado, with a 5th down opportunity and two seconds showing on the scoreboard.


One referee, the linesman Ron Demaree, thought something was wrong, but because he was part of a new crew he did not trust himself to broach the issue. Over the course of the game Demaree slid a rubber band from finger to finger as the downs changed, a kind of manual failsafe against the box man and scoreboard and head referee, who were capable of making errors in the heat of battle.

Demaree remembered that his rubber band was on fourth down when Colorado spiked the ball with two-seconds left, but when he looked to the sideline, to the scoreboard, and to his head referee, he saw the entire apparatus crushing forward, as though it was only then fourth down, and convinced himself, in a near-perfect demonstration of the Asch Conformity Experiments, that they were right, and he was wrong. But Demaree’s role in this mayhem was not yet through.


Astonishingly, one man inside the stadium was absolutely certain it was 5th down, and he had a public-address system near at hand. Up in the Missouri press-box a man called Jack Watkins, an assistant sports-information director for the Tigers, and the game’s official scorekeeper, had counted out the plays, and the downs, and knew what the situation was beyond the shadow of a doubt.


When the box-man on the field showed 2nd down, Watkins announced to the newspapermen still in the press box that it was 3rd down. He called it 4th down when Johnson spiked the ball. And as Colorado lined up for its final play, Watkins called out to everyone within range of his voice: “Fifth-and-goal from the one-yard-line!”


Over the several minutes that it took for this sequence to develop, a large, ominous, and growing mob of Missouri fans had been gathering on the field. On the television broadcast tape you can see them at the top of the frame piling up like the Boston Marathon was about to begin.


By the time Colorado lined up for its 5th down play a mass of students and fans had crossed the track and pushed to the very apron of the playing surface. The leading edge of this horde was standing just feet behind Demaree on the goal line, nearly touching his back, and screaming into his ear that it was 5th down, that the crew was giving Colorado an extra play.


Colorado snapped the ball on 5th down and the clock ticked down to zero. The Buff’s quarterback, Johnson, took off to his right, saw a gap in the line, turned hard left and, slipping a little, dove toward the end zone. He was met by two Tigers’ defenders and knocked sideways, but he engaged his built-in gyroscopes and tried to roll off the contact, now falling backward toward the goal as his back hits the turf, and he bounces, and stretches, and the football goes over the line . . . .


Demaree is sprinting straight down that same goal line with a pile of players in front of him, trying to spot the ball. The fans are pouring onto the field believing Missouri had stopped Colorado short. Players from both sides are beginning to celebrate and Demaree, after an incredible, excruciating delay, throws his hands up into the air—touchdown Colorado! The Buffaloes had won the game! It was over . . . .

“Look out!” shouted Shapiro from the television booth, sounding like the newsman from the War of the Worlds. “They’re all over the field! The fans are streaming onto the field!”

A shock went through the crowd and mayhem broke loose. A horde of fans, and several Missouri players, rushed into Demaree’s face, screaming at him, chest to chest, eyeball to eyeball. The referees were accosted on the field by hundreds of fans enmeshed with Missouri's players and coaches, screaming that they had given Colorado an extra down and that the Buffaloes had been short of the end zone on the final play, anyway. It was complete chaos and cacophony as the referees tried, in a growing panic, to sort it out.


And, in the final analysis, it appeared that the mob was right on both counts. While the 5th down play is factually irrefutable, it does also appear that Johnson’s back hit the turf before he extended the ball across the goal line. It was only after he bounced, and arched his body, and stretched, that the ball just barely broke the white-painted plane of the end zone. He was down just inside the one-yard-line on 5th down, and Missouri was the rightful victor in more ways than one.


During the initial mayhem a group of fans tore down one set of goal posts, whether in a rage at what had happened or believing that they had won is not known. Colorado had celebrated for a moment on the field but quickly ran off to escape the menace that was taking shape around them. The referees, in a stupor, did not know what to do.

The field was painstakingly cleared by the police and stadium security. For the next twenty minutes the referees conferenced and attempted to figure out what had happened. During this time Watkins, the game’s official scorekeeper, and a group of Missouri administrators had mounted a wild campaign to force a summary reversal of the outcome.


They dispatched an assistant athletic director with a walkie-talkie to the official’s locker room to relay the sequence of plays straight from Watkins. The scorekeeper read it out, play-by-play, three times to the officiating crew, but could not convince the referees to reverse anything that had been called on the field. The referees did not know whether or not that was possible or even legal.

With a sullen and surly crowd shouting and booing in the stadium above them, and the agitation growing, the officials did not have the protocol to sort out the situation, so they dropped it. Instead, they summoned both teams back out to kick the extra point. Missouri still had a chance to block the kick and return it for two points and the tie. Under a barrage of booing and debris being lobbed down from the stands, Colorado snapped the ball, fell on it, and sprinted back to their locker room.


Leeuwenberg, Colorado’s center, said as he was running off the field for a second time, with the team partially protected by a phalanx of police officers, some Missouri fan with an object in his hand took a run at a Colorado player. But, swinging whatever it was he had, he knocked out a police officer instead. Four of the officers peeled away from the escort formation and clobbered the fan to the ground and arrested him amidst the stampede.

Screen shot showing Demaree swamped by players and fans moments after he had signaled touchdown on the final play.

“It scared me to death,” said Leeuwenberg. “I thought there was truly a chance I wouldn’t make it back to the locker room.”


A hoard of renegade fans later made its way up the stadium tunnel and found the official’s locker room. Sequestered inside, the referees sat listening as the door was pelted with bottles, loose equipment, and whatever else the attackers could find in the concourse before they, too, were hauled away. The referees would be escorted out of the stadium several hours later with police protection


Missouri head-coach Stull called what happened in those final thirty seconds 'the perfect storm.' No fewer than nine fronts had opened up at once to destroy the last moments of what had been a fantastic football game between old rivals. The slip. The spike. The new chain-gang rule. The sideline conference. The heart attack. The unfamiliar officiating crew. The timeout conversation. The stopped clock. The questionable touchdown call . . . . .


In the moments after the winning score had been signaled, with the crowd rushing onto the field and officials trying to figure out what to do, Stull had looked the referee right in the face and said: “I hope you guys are right about all of this, because if you aren’t, it’s not going to be very pretty.”


The officials had been wrong, and Stull was right: things got ugly.


In the fog of war during the post-game press conference McCartney could not calm down and refused to give an inch. He could not get himself to be far-sighted about the madness he had just lived through; instead he was enraged and defiant on behalf of his program. He cursed the wretched field conditions at his alma mater, thundering that the surface was unplayable, before launching into an out-of-my-cold-dead-hands style oath on behalf of his team.


“We don’t apologize for this victory. No way shape or form. Our students should know, if we were outplayed and the circumstances were fair, then we could very seriously consider forfeiting this game," said McCartney, making it clear that the latter option would not be exercised. The diplomacy would have to come on another day.

That afternoon lingered on a bitter note for the Tigers and sent their season into a tailspin, while the game had the opposite effect on Colorado. The close call had jolted the Buffaloes out of their slow start and they clobbered every team on their schedule for the rest of the fall, including Oklahoma at home and Nebraska on the road, before avenging their loss to Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl and winning the school’s first, and only, national title.


FALLOUT

Back in 1940 there had been a 5th down incident between Dartmouth and Cornell, with the Big Red the beneficiaries of an extra snap in a 7-3 victory over the Big Green. But in that case, when the foul up had been realized the day after the game, Cornell immediately forfeited the victory to Dartmouth and sent a telegram from its university offices congratulating Cornell on a hard-earned triumph. Some newspapers had carried the story on the front page.


In the aftermath of the Colorado and Missouri redux fifty years later there would be no telegram or dispatch emanating out of the athletic offices in Boulder. But the 5th Down Game in Columbia stayed with everyone who had participated in it, including McCartney, who began, over the years, to beat himself up for how he had handled the moment. Twenty years later, it was still on his mind.

“I went to school at Missouri, okay?” McCartney said during a 2010 interview with ESPN. “I’m an alum, okay? And all of this has tarnished that. That is a regret I will carry with me to my grave. I wasn’t gracious in victory. When you win, be humble, you know? So I say this to all the people of Missouri, I am sorry for the way I behaved. I behaved with immaturity. I should have handled that graciously, and I regret I didn’t uphold the tradition of being a Missouri Tiger better in that time of struggle.”

McCartney will have to accept that the apology will live forever, right beside the game.



POST SCRIPT:


5th Down College Football is a website built to host a book project.

 

The site itself is host to a collection of feature writing on the sport of college football, but it is also an active headquarters for an upcoming book in which author Mark Schipper embarked on a national odyssey to attend many of the sport's greatest rivalries, visit its most historic campuses and stadiums, and connect with its most important programs and greatest figures.

 

Schipper's two hypotheses were that college football is inseparable from American history and culture in a unique way, which is a worthy subject on its own, and that the sport was on the verge of revolutionary change, meaning it was going down its old roads for a final time, which gave the mission urgency.

The book is being slated for release in the Spring of 2025.


Please do not hesitate to invite your people to come join the virtual and moveable tailgate and jump in on the good times to come.


The more the merrier, indeed.


Mark Schipper

May 21, 2021

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5th-Down-CFB.png
5th Down College Football
5th Down College Football is a website built to host a book project.
 
The site itself is host to a collection of feature writing on the sport of college football, but it is also an active headquarters for an upcoming book in which author Mark Schipper embarked on a national odyssey to attend many of the sport's greatest rivalries, visit its most historic campuses and stadiums, and connect with its most important programs and greatest figures.
 
Schipper's two hypotheses were that college football is inseparable from American history and culture in a unique way, which is a worthy subject on its own, and that the sport was on the verge of revolutionary change, meaning it was going down its old roads for a final time, which gave the mission urgency.

The book is being slated for release in the Spring of 2025.
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