Sports make another laboratory of wishful-thinking. Remember the “I-70” World Series between St. Louis and Kansas City in 1987? In a crucial moment at Busch Stadium, the Cardinals catcher was about 7 feet away from tagging a Kansas City Royals base-runner who was called “out” at home plate. As a child, The Geek watched the replay in slow-motion and wondered if the umpire had, in fact, handed the Redbirds a break. Then, the old people in the room started speaking to each other in tones as if they were discussing how Santa Claus’ sled and a team of reindeer had been “spotted by radar” coming down from the North Pole. “That camera was too fuzzy to tell for sure” said an elder Cardinal fan. “I think his glove fades into the dirt on that there replay” muttered another. In the end, it didn’t matter if Kim Wexler had shown up to prove, indefatigably, that the Kansas City base-runner was safe. He was out, just as sure as we all wanted him to be out.
Crystal City’s heartbreak ending at Russellville puts the Hornets’ potentially-spiffy District seed in peril, upsets the CCHS kids just as a seminal Senior Night kickoff looms in 2 weeks’ time, and ruins what could have been a perfect W/L record in the 2022 regular season. For all those reasons, and more, Mississippi Magazine will take care to avoid “wishful thinking” when recapping the end of the Russellville-Crystal City game. Remember, none of The Geek’s criticism of Flappy & Pitchwell ever comes out of the age-old tripe of “paid-off” referees and “conspiracies.” Missouri refs are fallible human beings who are just as amateur-ish in skills and mental preparation as the student-athletes who aren’t getting paid to play.
But the Crystal City Hornets were hosed on a goal-line play on Friday night – a goal-line play that would have been overturned into a winning TD on any Saturday or Sunday. Controversial plays on the goal-line are different – you don’t have to be a gridiron rules expert or even a hardcore football fan to understand them.
Wishful thinking can apply to goal-line plays on which the ball isn’t visible. But when the egg’s in sight, it’s a fairly cut-and-dry deal. The player either stretches the ball beyond the white line’s nearest chalk while standing upright, or he doesn’t.
Crystal City junior Camden Mayes put the ball over the chalk on Friday’s last play at Russellville, helping the Hornets win 42-38 on another last-minute TD. Except that the Hornets didn’t, not according to the out-of-position zebra who ruled the catch-and-run short, and credited Russellville with a 38-36 victory.
Here’s the play for readers to judge for themselves. (Remember, no wishful thinking! You could have been a bean-farmer from Brazil just as easy.)
A common reaction to a no-call like Friday night’s is to say “but it looks, feels, and smells like a touchdown,” but that’s a deceptive way to think about it when “looks” is the only word that counts. Thankfully, you don’t need to “feel” the air or “smell” the turf to know that Crystal City actually scored a touchdown to stay unbeaten.
First, look at where the so-called “linesman” is positioned as Mayes stretches out for the TD. Standing at the 3-yard marker, well inside the out-of-bounds line, is a poor angle from which to determine if a ball crosses the pylon-plane. Anyone can attest to that who’s watched a goal-line series from a seat high-up near the 50-yard line. The official should have been heading for the goal-line as fast as he could, or at least given-up jurisdiction of the ruling to a referee who made straight-As in Trig II.
Now, look at the shadow of Mayes’ feet at the critical moment (pause the video around 0:07 if you need to). That shoe-shadow cast over the entire goal-line (and arguably even into the end zone) belongs to the CCHS ball-carrier. You can tell because of the longer, fatter shadow of his leg connected to the small, pointy shadow of his toe. That long shadow over the goal-line can’t belong to the Russellville tackler because he’s still standing straight below the waist, so that his legs and feet wouldn’t cast a profile across the white line like that. Debatably, a portion of Mayes’ torso and perhaps his entire other leg were across as well.
It defies belief that Mayes, still pointed forward at a 45-degree angle, could have been half-over the goal stripe physically, extended the ball 2 or 3 feet in front of him, and still not gotten the egg over the plane. In fact, the referee’s mistaken “spot” at 0:00 – almost at the exact 1-yard line! – seems to indicate that the ref treated the Camden Mayes catch without abiding by the forward-progress rule, which is ridiculous in a scenario in which Mayes was tackled hard and driven backward into the space where the ball was spotted. If a player runs backward by choice, like George Plimpton in Paper Lion, the ball is spotted where he goes down. But even that rule doesn’t apply to TD rulings on the goal-line, because the rules state that once a football crosses into the plane, it’s a touchdown, and the ball is dead. A player could extend the ball over the plane, then run 50 yards in the wrong direction, or punt diagonally out of the end zone as if making a 1-point play in Canadian football. Absolutely no difference. The ball breaks the plane – that’s it – it’s a TD.
For the CCHS Hornets, it also makes no difference exactly how Friday’s rip-off happened. It happened, and now the young squad is forced to turn the Russellville game into a learning experience and move ahead. But there’s a number of typical wrong-responses to a blown-call finish that can actually hurt a program worse than it helps, tasking Crystal City players, coaches, and fans alike with the challenge of avoiding those vibes while preparing to host Vandalia on Homecoming.
TGG does not want to hear any Hornet player interviews that say, “in our mind, we’re 6-0.” Crystal City is not 6-0. The team’s not exactly “defeated” either, so a better way to state Crystal’s “real” record is that the Varsity Hornets are 5-0-1, or just 5-0. Friday’s game has to be viewed as a “no contest” rather than a jilted win.
Why? Because you can’t say that a game was “badly officiated” and therefore your team should have won. What if the referee also made poor calls that benefited Crystal City in some way? It’s like a boxer blaming a slow-count referee for a KO-loss (ala Don King after Tyson-Douglas) after both fighters went down repeatedly and got up at the count of 9. Sure, the finish may have been unfair to 1 out of 2 fighters, but how many times was the loser helped by a slow count too?
It’s also sketchy to accuse a far-away referee of “home cooking,” though The Geek will not rule out bias as a potential cause behind Russellville’s camera-defying lead at the end of the game. The problem is that the referee could just as likely be from a Russellville-rival town and have no emotional interest in watching the Indians win. Imagine a referee from nearby Festus or Bonne Terre refereeing a bout between Hillsboro and Rolla High School, and getting accused of “home-team bias.”
The best thing CCHS can do is realize the blown-call might’ve been a blessing-in-disguise. Too many regular-season Ws can cause a developing MSHSAA team to receive a playoff seed that it’s unable to live-up to without more seasoning.
For instance, the Grandview Eagles of ’21 lost “heartbreakers” to St. Pius X and Father Tolton, but those “bitter” defeats helped the Birds of Prey avoid a scenario in which they would have gotten a bye-week instead of hosting the maiden playoff game in Winchester Avenue’s modern era, and been fated go 0-1 in District competition thanks to visiting Duchesne in GHS’s 1-and-only playoff tilt.
Imagine if Crystal City’s winning TD at Russellville had counted, and that Week 7 and Week 9 opponents Van-Far and Herculaneum were as awful as Week 8’s cupcake Missouri Military Academy. CCHS would finish the regular-season with a perfect 9-0 record, then get a playoff bye instead of hosting a history-making quarterfinal at Sunken Place. Then, the Hornets would potentially be the in same pickle that Grandview almost wound up in last fall, if Duchesne now finishes its season 1-2 or 0-3 against a crushing schedule and is seeded 4th in 2022. The Pioneers could be seeded 8th in C1D2 and still romp toward the finals.
9 lopsided wins in a row, followed by losing to a private school 45-14 in a single playoff game, would make an anticlimactic season-narrative for the exciting Varsity Hornets. (The Geek isn’t saying Crystal City can never win Class 1 so long as Duchesne is stupidly seeded there, but it helps to have a few playoff-weeks with which to build momentum and get a better look at what you’re dealing with, the way that it worked for Jefferson against Duchesne in the 2020 postseason.) It would also be a bummer way to foil the squad’s quest for 10 victories in a single campaign.
Garnering a humble #2 or #3 seed in D2 would enable Crystal City to host at least 1 and potentially more playoff dates this year, and maybe get to that 10-win mark after all without having to beat any artficifially souped-up teams. Think of it – Crystal City and SPX squaring-off as #2 and #3 seeds in a District Semifinal would be the most-anticipated small school bout in the Tri-Cities in over a 10–year span.
Heck, by this December, the Crystal City Hornet Booster Club might be sending last Friday’s blind-as-a-bat linesman in Russellville a Christmas card.
With a coupon for a pair of better glasses, of course.