The Victors

Syrfan is right, but so are you - we're just talking past each other.

NBC showed two "different" views of the penultimate play. In the first view (which was live action), the game showed the score on the NBC scorebug. This is a graphic generated by the network; it is supposed to be synced to the gameclock using a strobe light system, and here, yeah, it showed that the game was over before Micah Davis touches it. But over the course of the game the scorebug is decoupled - there are multiple different conceivable reasons for this identified by folks who understand the technology, but more direct evidence can be found using the many, many examples from both pro and college games televised by NBC where the stadium clock is visible and yet the scorebug shows a different time. I think people could have gotten on board with this provided they were trying to consider the issue in good faith, which obviously many people were not.

But good-faith confusion comes from the fact that NBC then showed a SECOND view of the play on replay, in which the game is featured on the screen without a bottom-border scorebug, and in the lower-left corner a "picture-in-picture" shot of the scoreboard clock is visible. This view also appears to show time expiring before Davis touches the ball. THIS is what demands explanation, and so far one hasn't been forthcoming. I'm pretty sure that the issue is caused by the fact that the scoreboard camera is unprocessed and at a different framerate than the field footage (which is also post-processed), but I can't verify it. There is a minority of people who don't believe in conspiracy, but who do believe the officials made an error who rely on this evidence, and I don't think they're necessarily silly to do so based upon this alone.

The issue that makes the "conspiracy" and "error" viewpoints BOTH dissolve is that we have numerous, numerous videos taken by the supercomputers in the pockets of every one of 110,000 fans in the stadium which ACTUALLY SHOW the stadium's clock as at 00:01 when Davis touches the ball. It's obvious from different videos taken by different people at different angles. Some are fuzzy, some are clear - all show the same thing.

To this end, I actually think that although Paul's article is well-written and comes to the correct conclusion, it's a little dismissive of the folks who believed they had a good faith objection based on what is above. That said, if those people still harbor beliefs of error after seeing the fan footage, or if they believe in a conspiracy - well, nobody can help them.