I Can't Complain (but sometimes I still do)

It's bad enough to lose the most important game of the year by only 3 points, but to know that 2 HUGE plays were incorrectly called on the field only adds to the pain. Kudos to USC Head Coach Pete Carroll for not raising a stink about the officiating. However, for us fans it's a long offseason and this is a topic that cannot be ignored.

Refs' fumbles cost Trojans

REPLAY: Two key plays that didn't get reviewed may lead to a challenge for coaches next season.

10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, May 13, 2006

By DAN WEBER
The Press-Enterprise

College football officiating supervisors admitted last week that the replay and on-field officials were wrong on two key plays that went against USC in the Trojans' 41-38 loss to Texas in the Rose Bowl in January.

The fallout won't change the result of that national championship game, but it could lead to changes in the replay rule before the end of the month.

Verle Sorgen, the Pac-10's coordinator of football officiating, said Reggie Bush's downfield lateral and Vince Young's pitch that led to a touchdown, both in the second quarter, were incorrectly called on the field.

Two plays, two laterals, two incorrect outcomes that gave Texas a TD and denied USC a chance for one, and also went without replay. In a three-point game decided with 19 seconds left, either could have been decisive.

In the Rose Bowl, the Big Ten Conference rules were in place, so a replay technical adviser monitored two TVs throughout the game with the power to stop the game at any time for a review.

"I don't know why the Bush lateral play has stayed under the radar the way it has," said Sorgen, a USC grad and Riverside native, from his Walnut Creek office. "The replay crew just missed stopping the game on that one. And no one on the field saw it."

Nor has anyone at USC complained about it.

"The last thing I'm going to do is spend any time worrying about something in the past that's over and done," USC coach Pete Carroll said Thursday.

What Sorgen said the officials should have seen was not a fumble, but an illegal forward pass as Bush tried to shovel the ball to unsuspecting wide receiver Brad Walker. Instead of Texas recovering the flubbed lateral at the 18, an illegal forward pass call would have penalized USC 5 yards, and the Trojans would have kept possession.

"That was an extraordinarily important play in the game, probably more than anything else that happened, the way it changed the momentum," Carroll said. "We'd have still had the ball with a first down on their 23. The penalty wouldn't have mattered at the end of a 37-yard play."

On the other play in question, Young scrambled for 10 yards to the USC 12 before pitching the ball to Selvin Young, who ran the final 12 yards for a touchdown and a 9-7 lead. Replays showed Vince Young's knee touched the ground before he pitched the ball.

One replay monitor caught the parts of the play that were legal, but the other malfunctioned and missed the knee-down lateral. By the time the crew realized what had happened, with ABC-TV replaying it to the nation, Texas was already lining up for the extra point.

Sorgen said there were three parts of the play that warranted review.

"Was it a forward lateral? No. Did the runner step out of bounds before the end zone? No. Was Young's knee down before the lateral? Yes. The ball should have been down at the 12-yard line," he said.

Dave Parry, the national coordinator of NCAA football officiating, and Sorgen agreed in their interpretation.

"Oh, it (his knee) was down," Parry told CBS SportsLine.com. "I went in at halftime to say, 'What went wrong?' "

By then it was too late to do anything.

That's why the NCAA football rules committee has unanimously recommended a change to the replay rule for all televised games next season that would allow each coach one challenge to stop the game and have a play reviewed, much like the NFL permits. If the coach were right, he wouldn't be charged a timeout or a challenge. If not, he loses his challenge and a timeout.

Carroll, who has consistently opposed instant replay since leaving the NFL for USC, might have had a chance to use it twice if that rule had been in place for the Rose Bowl.

"I might have," Carroll said, "although the replay of the Bush lateral was more obvious on TV than it was to us down on the field. It probably would have come down to what the guys in the booth had seen."

Sorgen said, "All five replays they did review, they got right, in my opinion. But they missed on the two they didn't do."

That's why the rules committee, if it has its way, will get approval for replay challenges from the rules oversight group at its meeting May 30. So while many USC fans haven't been able to bring themselves to watch the replay of the Rose Bowl, almost 4 ½ months after the game, they can at least take comfort in the fact that those plays that didn't get seen on replay by officials may help change the rules.

Sorgen said that if the officiating and replay system were up to par, the new appeals wouldn't change much.

"In the Mountain West Conference last year, the only one that allowed coaches' appeals, only five out of 35 were upheld," Sorgen said. Reach Dan Weber at dweber@PE.com

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Online at: http://www.pe.com/sports/college/usc/stories/PE_Sports_Local_S_usc_replay_14.8f1fdff.html