Alabama beat Georgia to win college football’s national title on Monday. The Tide are deserving champions. The touchdown they scored to tie the game with less than four minutes to play, however, shouldn’t have counted.
Before Tua Tagovailoa snapped the football on a crucial fourth-and-4 from Georgia’s 7-yard line, an Alabama’s receiver on the far left side of the field started the play early.
It was a false start on No. 22, Najee Harris:
Harris hadn’t completed a step by the time Bama’s center snapped the ball, but he’d started to come out of his stance in a way that clearly gave him an advantage on the play. It’s really close, but it’s also clear that Harris moved early. Here’s the above GIF, broken down to the exact moment Harris moved ever so slightly before the snap:
In the crew’s defense: This one’s hard to spot even on a slowed-down replay. Harris’ false start probably had nothing to do with the outcome of the play. Officials will never, ever get every call right, and this one was especially hard to spot.
This play resulted in a scrambling Tagovailoa finding No. 1 receiver, Calvin Ridley, for a touchdown, knotting the score at 20:
Players are allowed to be in motion at the snap, but they can’t be moving toward the other team’s goal line. Harris, at the bottom of your screen above, was moving forward. If his movement had been correctly flagged, Alabama’s fourth-and-4 at the UGA 7 would’ve become a more challenging fourth-and-9 from the 12.
There’s no knowing what would’ve happened next. Officials get calls wrong all the time because they’re humans doing a hard job. It’s easy to miss things in real time, even when the calls appear as obvious as this false start by Harris. But Georgia fans can and, in some circles, probably will feel bad about this play for a long time.
It was critical moment in the game, which ended up going into overtime thanks to this touchdown and a subsequent Alabama missed field goal. This is a play that’s going to be talked about well into the offseason, especially for a pair of SEC rivals that obviously haven’t seen the last of each other. The Tide and Dawgs might yet do this again.