If one call is enough to bury your offense for the following 57 minutes, your offense is the issue. Not the refs.
The issue I have has nothing to do with conspiracy ****. It has to do with the Big 10 refs both in football and in basketball suck. They impact games repeatedly.
Now why your thick head cannot contemplate that that phantom holding call was impactful is beyond me. You do realize we punched them in the mouth to go up 7-0 in 3 plays. We then cause a three and out on a beautiful sack with everybody covered downfield and get the ball back and run that play to almost midfield. We then get put back to the 11 and Kyle runs for 6 and 10 yards to make it 3rd and 4 and we false start and then have to punt after an unsuccessful 3rd and 9. It is pretty clear that our first 5 of 6 plays were very positive with good yardage and you can argue we were gashing them . If the hold doesn’t get called maybe Kyle’s next 16 yards gained moves us to the 35 with a first down closer to field goal or Td territory. There is a very real thing in football that you might have heard of , called “ Momentum “. We had all of it .
To prove it was real for the rest of the quarter , our defense botched 2 coverages on back to back plays to gift them the 7-7 tie. Even the announcers were saying McCarthy was struggling and after Jennings or the safeties left Donovan Edwards uncovered , Michigan had to resort to a trick play to get something done. We gifted them a TD.
But guess what , we still got the ball on the third drive and went right down the field again , so they weren’t stopping us and we still had momentum and but for another false start on 4th and 1 , we settled for the 51 yard FG that Patel just missed, had the distance but just sailed late 1-2 feet wide . The entire momentum was with Rutgers and more than likely we have the lead heading into the second quarter after the second drive before we try to add onto it on the third drive.
To try and claim that the refs call has no impact on the game when football is totally a game of momentum is just missing the essence of the issue for most of us. Sure maybe we weren’t good enough to hang with Michigan throughout , although I am sure Kirk wished he had that 4th and 2 play call to do over again , but things happen in games that refs effect. Like not even reviewing the fumble . Clearly Momentum had shifted to Michigan so our getting that fumble would have changed momentum back to us. How they didn’t even review was criminal.