Line blurred between sports, life

Lucas Mann Guest Writer

The fervor that college football stirs up can become frightening. This fact became more than evident in the recent controversy involving college football official Gordon Riese. Is a victory for teams that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) hastens to reiterate are amateur worth a school president degrading an official who made a mistake? Is it worth rabid fans responding to this unforgiving sentiment by threatening a man that they have never met, making his return to a job he has performed well for 28 years seem dangerous?

On Saturday, Sept. 16, the Oregon Ducks and the Oklahoma Sooners squared off in a highly anticipated, nationally televised college football game. Though just the third week of the NCAA season, this was a big game for both 15th-ranked Oklahoma and 18th-ranked Oregon. Aside from settling an age-old score on which school could find the least intimidating mascot, these teams were fighting to keep their undefeated records alive. The Ducks won in controversial fashion, scoring the go-ahead touchdown after receiving what may have been a gift of a call.
With 1:12 left on the clock, down 33-27, Oregon kicked an onside kick, a last ditch effort to regain possession and score one more touchdown. According to the rules of football, an onside kick must travel a full 10 yards before the kicking team can touch it and potentially recover it. Oregon got possession of the kick, and Oklahoma challenged, claiming (apparently correctly) that the Ducks had touched the ball too soon. This is when poor Riese entered the story.

Riese was an instant replay official for the Pacific-10 Conference. On the sidelines on Saturday, he decided that Oregon had not touched the ball early and awarded them the possession that ended up winning them the game. Riese had been happily officiating the conference’s game for 28 years. He will miss next week’s game, however, as will the rest of his crew, all suspended for what what University of Oklahoma President Dave Boren described as an “outrageous injustice” done to his school.

Certainly, now a safe few days away from the initial shock of the game, outrageous injustices have been done. However, all in all, it would seem that the greatest injustice has been done to Riese himself. His mistreatment extends beyond the field of intercollegiate athletics and into his livelihood, his family, and his sanity. It also speaks volumes about the failure of college football culture, at times, to see the line between what matters in a game and what matters in life.

Riese has spent the past jobless week taking phone calls from all over the country. Some threatened his family. One of the phone calls was a death threat. Right now, members of his town police department are surveying his neighborhood for suspicious vehicles, while Riese wonders if he will go back to work this season. But forget about Gordon Riese. Boren is still offended.
In a letter of complaint to the Big 12 Conference, Boren wrote: “It is truly sad and deeply disappointing that members of our football team should be deprived of the outcome of the game that they deserved because of an inexcusable breakdown in officiating.” Boren is the president of one of the largest academic institutions in America, publicly enraged over a mistake in a football game.

What will be easily remembered by Sooner diehards and casual football fans alike is the classic story of a heartbreaker of a game, in which one team got hosed. However the misfortune of a team and its fans has added a chapter in another common story in sports: the backlash that happens when a game ends with a winner, a loser, and a scapegoat.