Miami's Crazy Win Against Duke Shows How College Football Is Broken, and Wonderfully So

College football was birthed out of chaos, and into chaos it shall forever revert. It was invented on Ivy League campuses by students determined to beat the living daylights out of each other, an odd and disjointed and anarchic evolutionary leap from rugby, the sport that remains an essential part of football's DNA. All of which is one way of justifying what the hell happened late last Saturday night in Durham, North Carolina, when this sport once again harkened to its roots with a rugby-style finish that refused to adhere to common sense, when the rickety phantoms of ill-gotten Fifth Downs and bands on the field and phantom feet inbounds were resurrected once more.

This was not the first college football game of the season that ended in inexplicable fashion; it almost certainly won't be the last. What set this finish between Duke and Miami apart, of course, is that the referees blatantly got it wrong. In an ideal and impartial and logical world, it never should have happened. And yet because this is college football, Miami's win conforms to the sort of magical realism that has defined the sport since its inception. Duke should have won the game, but by Duke not winning the game, it became one of the most memorable finishes in the history of the sport. Either you can live with that trade-off, or you probably spend more time embracing the cold hard reality of the National Football League over the biological flaws of the college game.

Here is where I should probably link you to video of what happened, because I'm not sure how to fully explain it. I mean, it starts with Miami receiving a kickoff in the final seconds, trailing Duke by three points, and the Hurricanes doing the only thing you could possibly do in that situation: lateraling the football over and over again. Eight times, the Hurricanes hurled the football about, slowly tracking backward toward their own end zone, appearing to inexorably seal their doom, until suddenly a young man with the Tolkienesque name of Corn Elder took a lateral and found a crease along the left side of the field and ran all the way into the end zone for the game-winning score.

Except … except … well, good Lord, how many freaking "excepts" can there be on one play? How about at least two that the Atlantic Coast Conference would later admit? How about the fact that the knee of Miami's Mark Walton almost certainly hit the ground at one point before he lateraled the ball away? How about an illegal block in the back that wasn't called at Miami's own 16-yard line? And for those of us who sat there, gaping at our television screen as we waited for the official review, we kind of presumed that something would nullify this play. Because it felt too good to be true. Because it was too good to be true.

Except, in the end, the officials proved themselves to be just as flawed as the players. In the end, the referee, Jerry Magallanes, issued an explanation that made little sense, and declared that the play was legal, and proclaimed that Miami had won the football game.

This will cause much consternation over the next several days, and with good reason. Something went wrong with both the officiating and the replay review process here, and those mistakes should be investigated and corrected. At some level, though, this was a reminder that college football is beautiful largely because it is rife with mistakes. This finish was reminiscent of Cal-Stanford, the greatest ending in college football history—and maybe the greatest climax in the history of American sports—and that probably shouldn't have been allowed, either, considering a wayward trombone player was involved. But it was, and it changed the lives of everyone involved.

I know you might tell me that historical impact is not enough of a reason to justify a dunderheaded decision, but here is what I would say in response: for all the money involved in college football (none of which is going to the players themselves, but let's hold back on that argument for today), for all of its regression toward a zero-sum playoff model in recent years, it is still a sport that is stubbornly tied to the educational system. Most of the players involved in that Duke-Miami finish will never play professional football; most of the players involved in that finish will look back fondly on their college football experience and perhaps recall this ending as one of the strangest and most intense moments of their young lives. What better lesson is there than that life is cruel and capricious and judgmental?

Someday, I have no doubt, this karma will come back to haunt Miami (if it hasn't already). It always does. The first time I witnessed in person an injustice in college football, I was nine years old. It was 1982, and Penn State defeated Nebraska—and eventually won a national championship—thanks to a catch by a tight end whose feet were roughly four miles out of bounds. Thirty years later, Penn State got screwed during a loss to Nebraska on an equally wrongheaded call. That's the thing about college football: it is a sport practiced by unformed young students who make blatant mistakes while encroaching upon adulthood. Shit happens, and then that shit comes back around, because as much as the men in charge may try to control the happenings on the field, chaos is the defining factor. That's not always fair, but neither is life.