Western Michigan celebrated beating Michigan, then a hidden clock added a second

Lance Taylor, the head coach at Western Michigan, was throwing up the double peace signs for the cameras. The clock above him read zero. His sideline had rushed the field and the fans behind his bench were going wild, and for a few seconds Western Michigan had beaten Michigan in its own stadium for the first time ever.

Then the officials stopped the celebration about halfway onto the field. Taylor still had his headset on. They told him the play was under review and to get his players back to the sideline, and he turned to his assistants with a new instruction: they might have one more play to defend.

That is the story of the strangest finish of college football's opening weekend, and why it still stings. What TV viewers saw as a finished game, with zeros on the screen and coaches walking out to shake hands, was reopened on the basis of time that viewers never saw. Michigan got the extra down and won, after Western Michigan had already started celebrating.

The Big Ten's explanation was that there were effectively two clocks. The one on television and the scoreboard showed no time left. Another official clock, tracked in the replay booth and unseen by the public, still had about a second left when a Michigan player jumped with a foot outside the rear of the end zone and may have grazed the ball. That flicker of contact, measured in tenths of a second, was enough to put the second back and replay the down.

Taylor got the league's evidence on the bus ride home. Officials sent a super slow motion video from the review booth, complete with live audio of the replay officials talking through each frame as a countdown ticked in the background. He said the league cooperated, but the problem was plain. The booth clock did not sync with the NBC clock or the stadium board, and he had to try to explain to his young men that the zero they all saw was not the zero that counted.

Mike Pereira, the former NFL officiating chief who explains rules on television, is said to advise that when the TV clock and the officials' clock disagree, officials should stick with the time shown to the audience to avoid suspicion about a hidden decision. This time, officials went with the clock nobody could see.

Taylor called it the wildest ending in his 20 years as a player and coach. Lance Taylor said, "There were tears in the locker room," and he told his players there was nothing he could say to make it stop hurting. They had gone toe to toe with a program known for physical football, and been the more physical team.

"They can put another second back on the clock, but they can't take that away," Taylor said.