BYU Earned It. The No-Call and the 'Missing Second' Excuses Don't Hold Up.

Saturday in Provo, eighth-ranked BYU took down No. 2 Notre Dame 28-24, ended the Irish's 16-game run of wins and moved to 6-0. By Sunday morning, much of the country had shrunk the whole night down to one no-call and one second. That is a lazy way to read a football game, and it is wrong.

The complaints are simple. Critics say defensive pass interference belonged on the final throw, and that Notre Dame deserved one more second to run another play. Both arguments fall apart the moment you look at the rest of the game instead of the last four seconds of it.

The last snap came on first-and-goal at the BYU 8 with four seconds left. CJ Carr threw for Jaden Greathouse in the right corner of the end zone, BYU corner Evan Johnson stayed with him, the ball fell incomplete, and no flag came out. Fans stormed the field.

Start with the flag that wasn't. There were multiple missed pass interference calls in this game that did not go BYU's way, and the people screaming about one of them have conveniently forgotten the rest. BYU lived with bad PI calls all night and kept winning anyway.

Look at the record. BYU Cougars Wire pointed out that an earlier play "very similar" to the final one was flagged as pass interference against BYU. Same kind of hand-fighting, opposite result. In the third quarter, a 39-yard Bear Bachmeier touchdown pass to Jojo Phillips that would have put BYU up 28-10 was erased by an offensive pass interference flag on the Cougars, per the USA Today live blog. That is seven points the officials took off BYU's side of the board.

Then there is the final play itself, the one Notre Dame calls a robbery. Cougars Wire wrote that "the wide receiver's right hand was firmly around the left wrist of the BYU defensive back." That is the receiver grabbing the defender. If anyone was getting away with something in that corner of the end zone, it was Notre Dame. Watch the angle below and tell me otherwise.

Yes, ABC's Matt Austin said on air he "would've supported a DPI," per The Athletic's report in the Salt Lake Tribune. He was judging one set of hands. Judge both, and the flag Notre Dame wants is a flag that should have gone against Notre Dame.

Now the clock. Clock management in this game was imperfect from start to finish. The clock started late after the snap at times, and the timing was inconsistent all night. Pretending that one second at the very end is the only timing error that mattered is selective outrage, not analysis. NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay argued that replay should have reviewed the final play. Fine. Then review all of it.

Start with that very snap. OutKick founder Clay Travis posted the play and asked, "Did clock start late? Seems impossible Carr could roll right and throw this pass in under four seconds." If the clock started late, Notre Dame got extra time on that play before anyone ever talked about a missing second. The second Irish fans claim they lost was already spent.

And Notre Dame's worst clock disaster was its own. At the BYU 5 with nine seconds left in the first half, Carr tried to spike the ball without full control of the snap. Review ruled it a fumble, and BYU's Jayven Williams recovered, the live blog recorded. The Irish went to the locker room down 21-10 with nothing from a trip to the 5. No replay booth did that. Fixating on one second at the end, after a game full of messy timing, is unmerited.

Then came the Big 12 with a statement that was ridiculous to issue at all. Late Saturday night the conference said, per ESPN: "Following the Big 12's review of the final play of Saturday's Notre Dame-BYU game, it was determined that time remained on the clock when the ball hit the ground and the play was incorrectly cleared by the replay officiating crew. The Conference will conduct a complete review of its end-of-game officiating process in advance of next week's games."

Read it again and notice what is missing. The Big 12 admitted time remained when the ball hit the ground. It never admitted the clock started late after the snap. It found the error that helps Notre Dame's story and said nothing about the one that cuts the other way. That is a selective confession, and it was made at the expense of its own member school.

It also changes nothing. After this season's Western Michigan-Michigan clock fight, the NCAA said its rules contain no protocol for overturning a game's outcome, The Athletic noted. The score stands. The only thing the statement produced was a permanent asterisk for Notre Dame fans to wave.

And look at who handed it over. Notre Dame is an independent, so its games are officiated by the opponent's league. This was the Big 12's crew, working what Cougars Wire called one of the biggest wins in BYU history. Earlier that night, the league's own account was celebrating the upset with a "shamrocked" post. Then it threw its own school under the bus to look accountable. A quiet internal review would have fixed the process without branding the win.

The losing coach got it right. "It is what it is. I know people are going to look for me to put blame on somebody else, but that's not what we do around here," Marcus Freeman said, per USA Today. "We own it."

Voters agreed with him. BYU rose to No. 2 in Sunday's AP Top 25, its highest ranking since 1984, as KSL's Mitch Harper reported. BYU absorbed bad PI calls, lost a touchdown to a flag, played through a sloppy clock and still won. The scoreboard said BYU. Freeman said Notre Dame owns it. Everyone else, including the Big 12, should catch up.