Next question: just how much weight should be placed on the spot of the ball after the fumble? This is a provocative and worthwhile question to ask for four reasons: 1) with USC’s boatload of weapons, the Trojans had two chances (with seven seconds left) to score, and ample ways in which to do so; freaking out about the spot of the ball suggests that USC would have been in deep trouble with a spot at the two or three; 2) Matt Leinart’s sneak was no sure thing, especially since Notre Dame’s front initially stopped the Heisman Trophy winner, who showed enormous presence to not only keep his legs churning (so many lesser quarterbacks would have just piled into the line and let the chips fall where they may), but to slide along the line in search of a pocket of open space, which is exactly what he found; 3) if you were observing closely, you would have noticed that the ball, initially spotted on the three-inch line before Leinart’s sneak, was moved back to the hash mark denoting the one-yard line, thereby making the sneak an especially risky proposition; 4) let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Leinart’s fumble did go out of bounds at the 3, and that USC’s subsequent attempt at the end zone (assuredly a pass under such a circumstance) failed. In that case, Pete Carroll—gutsy as he was and is—still had the option of a tying chip-shot field goal. USC, even with its coach’s professed desire to win or lose the game at the end of regulation, nevertheless had the field goal always available as a fall-back plan. If this was a four-point Irish lead, one can then make appropriate adjustments in assessing the degree to which USC was lucky. Yes, the Trojans were very much lucky, but not that lucky. Focusing on the subject of “lucky bounces” means that you also have to account for a fortuitous bounce off Ambrose Wooden’s helmet that created a somewhat-but-not-entirely-earned end zone interception for the Irish in the second quarter.
Next question: what to make of Reggie Bush pushing Matt Leinart into the end zone? There are two kinds of people in this world: letter-of-the-law people and spirit-of-the-law people, and they could get into a robust philosophical debate of this issue until next year’s Irish-Trojans game in LA.
Those who promote the letter of the law could legitimately point to the NCAA rulebook, which states that "no other player of (the runner's) team shall grasp, push, lift or charge into him to assist him in forward progress." It would be technical, but it would also be true, and backed by that most authoritative of sources: the hard, written-down code itself. On the other hand, those who believe in the spirit of the law could just as legitimately say that a penalty for assisting a runner is virtually NEVER called in such rugby-scrum-type situations, and that said penalty is usually enforced only in more isolated, open-field situations when one lineman clearly helps a runner move forward. To put an even finer point on this issue, the penalty for helping a runner is and has been historically applied when linemen pull or drag a runner forward, as opposed to pushing from behind.
Since we’re in the middle of the baseball playoffs, let’s use this example as a perfect point of comparison. The baseball rulebook has not been changed in terms of referring to the top of the strike zone as “the midpoint between the top of the shoulder and the top of the uniform pants.” Yet—and the first baseball game I can consciously remember watching was in 1982—I have rarely seen this rulebook version of the strike zone enforced. The belt, not the letters, is the top of the strike zone in terms of the way umpires have enforced the strike zone in real life (at least, in the past quarter-century). Therefore, to flag Reggie Bush for a penalty would be akin to calling a letter-high strike in baseball: technically correct, but so rarely invoked that enforcement of the rule in this situation would have been dubious.
And after all, let’s fall back on this larger reality, too: since Notre Dame is a Catholic school to begin with, a spirit-of-the-law perspective consistent with a non-literal reading of the Bible and a celebration of Sacred Mystery should prevail at this school. What Would Jesus Flag? Not Reggie Bush on that last play. And if Brady Quinn was pushed into the end zone by Darius Walker, the very same principle would apply.
Getting beyond those final two plays, there are so many other aspects of this SC-Notre Dame game that can enable studied, reasoned, knowledgeable, and information-armed fans of both teams to honestly disagree about genuinely debatable points.
Who got jobbed by the officials to a worse degree? This cuts both ways. USC got screwed in the second-quarter scuffle following a pileup after a fumble. When it was clear that members of both teams pushed and shoved, trading blows in roughly equal measure, the zebras somehow flagged only a Trojan, safety Josh Pinkard. But later on, the refs—who, in clear view of NBC cameras, threw a flag that was ostensibly for holding against the Trojans—never even mentioned the penalty while assessing a dead-ball personal foul penalty against the Irish. True, the presence of a dead-ball foul meant that USC would have received a fresh set of downs no matter what, but the holding penalty that was somehow swallowed would have put the scrimmage line around the Irish 17 instead of the Irish 9. It made it that much easier for USC to score. And while a second-quarter Jeff Samardzija catch should have been ruled incomplete, such a reality must be tempered by the fact that Pete Carroll didn’t want replay in this game. It was by his own choice that some plays cut against him, and he’s fortunate that replay (or its absence) didn’t come back to haunt his team.
