I don't recall the players acting like it was a turnover either. If one of them would have run it back to the endzone after they picked it up, the refs probably would have looked at it closer.
To be honest, I thought it was a forward pass at first too, because, well, it went forward. And I thought one of our guys was going to snag it And when it was on the ground first, that was it.
However, I’m not a professional referee, or sportscaster either. I don’t know the exact rule about the arm moving forward and when it begins. Whatever it is, there were several good camera angles that could have been reviewed so we could be sure.
All that said, that one call could have been huge. As has been noted, we would have had the ball inside the 20, and at that point we were moving the ball well enough that a touchdown was more than a 50/50 probability. And if—I don’t remember the whole sequence—Cal scored on that drive, that alone would have been a swing of 14 points. A successful 2-point conversion would have finished regulatIon in a tie. Of course, there’s no telling what actually might have happed after that.
But it’s not beyond possibility that Illinois could have won this game. And how 2019 Illinois would that have been?
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