Your biggest Sports BS moment

In My Humble Opinion
1

I finally decided to go ahead and subscribe. And to commemorate this occasion here is a thread have been meaning to start and keep forgetting. And was reminded of by the Maradona thread in MPSIMS and the “Hand of God”

What is the biggest sports bullshit moment in your world. The crap call missed by the refs or administrative foul up that screwed over your team.

Only screwed calls(or feasibly considered screwed calls) count, not miraculus turns of fate. ie Bucky Dent hit a legit homer so it doesn’t count.

a few Contenders for biggest of all time:

Hand-of-God.
Dempsy Long count.
USA-USSR 1980 Olmypic Basketball game.
Brett Hull overtime Finals crease goal.
Tom Brady tuck rule.

But my personal moment I still get mad about: 1990 College football. Michigan is going for a two point conversion against Michigan State to win with about 1 minute left. Desmond Howard is split out and everybody knows he is the target. The play starts, #1 he is held immediatly, the refs don’t make the call. #2 The ball is thrown and he gets tripped and the refs still don’t make the call. #3 by the rules of the day he actually caught the ball, but the refs call it incomplete.

What’s yours?

Please remember this is a IMHO poll not a pit thread. :wink:

2

Doh! Make that
USA-USSR 1972 Olympic Basketball game.

3

South Korea vs. Italy, '02 World Cup. A travesty beyond words. Italy has TWO goals called back due to utterly nonexistent fouls. I’ve never, ever, seen such unbelievably brazen robbery in this event. And not only was Italy screwed, but this pretty much handed the championship to Brazil, in one of the most anticlimactic World Cup finals on record. And to put a truly psychotic spin on it, everyone afterward joked about how this was just South Korea’s home field advantage. Barf.

The Olympics. I could fill three threads with just these. A few off the top of my head: The Canadian swimmer robbed of a gold medal because a judge pushed the wrong buttons, and it took her over a decade to get justice. The '72 basketball gold medal game, an utter mockery of sport right down to the protest panel containing three Soviet Union possessions. The roughly 50,000 insane boxing decisions, one of which went to (surprise!) a South Korean. A pommel horse being set too low (which in any sane event results in a no-contest), and the resulting diastrous vaults being allowed to stand just freaking because. Figure skating, which is as bogus as pro wrestling when things don’t go horribly wrong. A sprinter DQed after a good start because apparently he was just too good. Blown calls, ham-handed decisions, blatant partisanship, it just goes on and on and on, justice is virtually never done, and nobody ever gives a damn.

The Jeff Maier interference non-call. Everything about this just turned my stomach. Start with the blown call. Proceed to the baffling canonization of the brat…oh yeah, did I mention he was cutting school at the time?..right down to calling him an “Angel in the Outfield”. (Here’s a tip for someone trying to get a cheap headline out of a movie title that may or may not have one tiny freaking iota of relevance…DON’T.) And then, of course, the stupid jokes, which blew what slim chance we had of a meaningful discussion of the whole issue to bits. Let’s get a few things straight: It was a blown call. It should’ve been an out. Cutting class isn’t a good thing. Interfering isn’t a good thing. It’s possible to get tossed from the stadium for interference. Interfering and lucking out with a blown call does not make you a good person, let alone an angel!!!

Colorado’s “fifth down”, which resulted in them getting the win and eventually the national championship, and a whole lot of yahoos saying that’s the way it is, too bad, it happens, whaddya gonna do, okaylet’smoveonnow. (Four atrocities for the price of one!) But what makes this really unbearable was…the championship was decided by polls!! In other words, they never had to profit from this hideous mistake! Just don’t vote them #1, guys! What the hell were they thinking? “Aw, gee, the win was completely bogus, and no way in hell should they benefit from it, and they certainly don’t deserve the championship, but the win’s in the books, so, uh, I guess I gotta go by it and stuff.” Say what you will about the BCS, but even that has nothing on a group of supposedly knowledgable people witnessing a gross injustice, having the complete, unilateral power to not reward the injustice, and rewarding it anyway.

Maybe some of them were trying out to be figure skating judges, I dunno…

Gah…DKW stop now…will go on for hours if not stop…wish that were joke…

4

This game didn’t have a lot of importance. Cubs @ D’Backs, late August of last year.

Carlos Zambrano had a no-hit bid into the eighth inning. I couldn’t tell you which D’Back hit what was ruled an infield hit to third. I was sitting just off 1st base and can tell you that the runner was OUT. The third baseman made the throw, and, while it was close, the runner was definatly out. ESPN’s slowed-down highlights showed the runner out. But the Ump called him safe.

The Cubs won the game anyway, so all was OK.

I was at that game with a friend, a lifetime Cubs fan, who had never been to a LIVE game before that day. He came 5 outs away from seeing a no-hitter for his first live MLB game. I saw the Cubbies play live 8 times before I saw them do so much as win. I was a little jealous of his good fortune.

(5 outs away, why is that so familier?)

5

The thread really ended on DKW’s point about the Olympics, a sporting event so brazenly corrupt I sometime wonder if it’s broadcast by the Oceanian Ministry of Truth. I would say without exaggerration that a single Summer Games has more horrible judging calls and outright fixed events than ten seasons of basketball, football, baseball and hockey combined.

6

That would be the horse, or vault. The pommel horse is a different animal. :slight_smile:

7

It would have to be the Coin Toss in the Thanksgiving’s Day Game a few years back between the Lions and the Steelers. The Steelers were able to make the call going into overtime, the ref was apparently deaf and thought he heard the captain say the OPPOSITE of what he clearly said, and Detroit was awarded the ball. Steelers lost that game…and I think they lost all the rest of their games that season. And since that season they have been particularly poor. :frowning:

The Coin Curse. After that game they implemented the rule that the choosing team calls it BEFORE THE COIN IS EVEN FLIPPED.

8

The recent Duke-UConn basketball game in the NCAA Final Four. Out of a 40 minute game I saw about 3 minutes of basketball, due to the refs calling each and every nit-picking non-existant brush up. Okefor had two fouls with 16 minutes left in the FIRST HALF. THREE of Duke’s centers fouled out. The referees’ style of calling favored UConn’s coaching style (conservative), and UConn won the game in that refereeing atmosphere. But fans of BOTH teams hated that game.

9

Holy shit, so it WAS the event where you run at full speed and jump where this error occurred? I mean, a pommel horse being set too low isn’t a good thing either, obviously, but I can’t see anyone breaking their neck becaue of it, whereas I can see plenty of opportunities for disastrous injuries if the vaulting equipment were messed up. All that running at full speed, you know.

10

Hmmmm…

The 5th down is a good choice, as is the coin toss.

I’ll add an NFL game from around '99 or so. Vinny Testaverde is scrambling near the end zone and is tackled at least a yard short. It is ruled a touchdown. Now this game wasn’t all that meaningful, but the call was SO bad (I mean he wasn’t even close to the end zone) that this is primarily the reason reply was reinstated.

I’ll 3rd DKW’s “anything Olympics” vote too. Especially the Roy Jones decision in '88. The most blatant screw-job I’ve ever seen in sports. I’m actually somewhat surprised that he was able to have a successful career afterward. Lots of people would’ve been crushed if something they had worked for their whole life was taken away by such blatant corruption.

11

My own is recent: people thinking that “the fan” caused the Cubs to lose the penant and possibly the world series.

That fallacy deserves more than a mere :rolleyes:

12

Actually, the 5th down game is one of those things that has grown in myth over time. As it happened, there was great confusion on the field, and the Colorado QB, looking at the 3rd down marker (when it was really 4th down), spiked the ball to stop the clock. They then ran the play they would have run anyway (off-tackle from the one foot line) and scored. If you believe that the game should have been called over after 4th down, then Colorado would have gotten screwed just as badly as Missouri felt they were. The game ended with the most likely outcome as the final result.

My picks - Roy Jones, Seoul Olympics, and Don Denkinger’s bad call at first base in the 198? world series that killed the KC Royals, who went on to lose the series.

13

I still get a bit ticked about a call in my High School football years (20 some-odd years ago.)

We actually had a shot at winning a game (the Scapgoats has nothing on us), and the ref discounted a field goal because it was kicked above the level of the posts. The kick was between the posts, but too high.

We went 0-10 that year.

One call that had 20,000+ asking themselves “WTF?” was a call in a preseason bowl game in 2002. NC State vs. New Mexico. State was up rather lopsidedly and on offense. Coach Amatto was running the clock. The Conference USA ref called Delay of Game… on the defence. Had the circumstances been different, I’m sure there would have been massive riots, but as I recall, all the spectators were scratching their heads. The raido color commentator’s analysis was, “huh.”

14

The count was quite correct and had no effect on the outcome of the bout. Dempsey ignored the new rule that the count couldn’t begin until he went into a neutral corner and it took a few seconds for him to comply. Also, photos show that Tunney was conscious and ready to get up well within ten seconds, but waited until the count reached nine to get a few more seconds of rest.

15

ANY Olympic ice dancing competition. All 3 medals are decided well in advance of the games and everybody knows it.

How about the blown call at first base by Denkinger in the 1985 Cardinals-Royals World Series?

Then there’s the famous Armbrister interference play in the 1975 World Series.

16

That football/soccer match where they didn’t call the guy offside when he was or did call him offside when he wasn’t. Oh wait, that is almost every soccer game.

17

Nah, it killed St. Louis - Kansas City won that year.

How about Jordan’s blatant push off Russell for that game winner in 1998? Anyone else would have been called for the ridiculous offensive foul, but not Jordan. Pfffft. Utah should have won that year.

18

I know little of the situation, but I remember seeing clips of a college basketball game where one team had 6 men on the court for several minutes.

19

While I freely concede that the rule may have been stupid, the call was correct, and followed the rule as written. Blame the competition committee, not the refs for that.

20

The only one I can recall (I purge these events from my memory or else I would go crazy) is USC getting bumped to third in the polls (and costing ME PERSONALLY a trip to New Orleans) because of games of no consequence involving Hawaii and Notre Damn.

And every now and then, Formula One seems like the “Michael Schumacher Honorary Processional Series” and some rule gets modified on the fly to insure he succeeds on any given weekend. But he probably would have won anyway, so all the marshalls do is make themselves look like right asses.