Physicist believes refs got spot wrong in Ohio State-Michigan game

Throughout the embarrassing debacle that is now known as “Deflategate,” we heard from numerous science experts who tried to prove the New England Patriots could not have cheated. Now, we have something similar going on with the infamous spot in the Ohio State-Michigan game.

Bill Llope, a nuclear physicist at Wayne State, believes the Wolverines were robbed of a victory. If the officials had more time to break the play down from the appropriate angles, Llope is confident they would have come to the conclusion that the Buckeyes were stuffed on 4th-and-1 in overtime.

“Let’s say you and someone else are driving in a car,” Llope told Shawn Windsor of The Detroit Free Press. “You are right in front of the speedometer. You see you are going 60. Someone else is in the passenger seat. They will see you going at a slightly slower speed, because of their angle. They see a different answer than someone who is straight on.”

Like someone looking at a speedometer from the passenger seat, Llope says a referee who is behind the play at all would be more likely to think the ball advanced further than it did. He said the same problem exists with replay angles, which are not perfectly aligned with the play. And then there’s what Llope described as the “flash lag effect.”

“If somebody is running left to right, the runner appears farther right than he actually is,” Llope said. “This is because your brain is extrapolating where that runner will be.”

Llope says his years of schooling led him to conclude Ohio State quarterback J.T. Barrett came up “a few inches short” of a first down. Although, you can probably guess where Llope got some of his education. Yes, Ann Arbor.

“But again, I’m an alum,” he admitted.

Personally, I thought replays showed Barrett advanced the ball far enough with forward progress. Jim Harbaugh disagreed, and you see what he had to say about the call here. Perhaps I was seeing things, as Llope suggests.