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The craziest things that happened at LaVell Edwards Stadium on Friday night were on the field — as you'd expect in a 55-53 shootout, which BYU won. But there was also weirdness in the ESPN2 broadcast booth.

At the very least, there was some poor planning.

It was downright strange when color analyst and former Texas coach Mack Brown suddenly up and left.

Geez, if Brown was going to leave a BYU game early, you'd have thought it would've been in 2013, when his team was trounced 40-21 in Provo by a Cougar team that ran for 550 yards and totaled 679 yards of offense — a game that contributed to Brown's (forced?) retirement at the end of that season.

With 11 minutes left in the BYU-Toledo game on Friday, play-by-play man Adam Amin told viewers, "Apparently, Mack's got to leave us right now. Otherwise, you're not going to see this shining face on your TV tomorrow. We're going to miss you, pal."

According to ESPN, Brown left to catch a flight back to the East Coast so he could be in studio for Saturday's games.

"You sure you don't want to stick around for the rest of this thing?" Amin asked. When Brown left, Toledo had just taken a 45-42 lead, so he missed BYU's tying field goal with 5:21 to play; BYU's go-ahead-touchdown with 3 minutes to play; Toledo's TD and two-point conversion (off a fumbled snap) to take the lead with 1:11 remaining; and BYU's game-winning field goal as time expired.

"I hate to leave the game, but this is going to finish as one of the best games of the year," Brown predicted, suggesting to Amin that "maybe you can be me and you, and [sideline reporter] Molly [McGrath] can help."

"So, Mack departs, and the nation's fears come to a head," Amin joked. "Me and Molly McGrath are going to take you the rest of the way."

Other than bad grammar, it wasn't really a problem. Although some suggested otherwise — including Business Insider, which opined that it was "certainly not ideal. Immediately after Brown leaves the booth [there] is seven seconds of silence."

Horrors! Seven seconds without somebody talking during a football telecast!

USA Today called the game "a 108-point classic," adding, "It was also long. It was really, really long."

Actually, no. It definitely was not "really, really long" compared to other college football games. It wasn't much longer than average.

In 2014, Football Bowl Subdivision games averaged 3:23. The BYU-Toledo game ran 3:29.

And the average duration of BYU's first four games this season was 3:29 — 10 minutes less than Friday's game. The Sept. 10 game at Utah actually ran eight minutes longer than the Cougars-Rockets contest.

It didn't help Brown's tight schedule that ESPN2 delayed the kickoff from 8:15 to 8:26 p.m. because of a baseball game. (And delaying the kickoff didn't help much, either — the baseball game ran so long that ESPN2 didn't get to BYU-Tolodeo until almost 14 minutes into the game.)

The fact is that Brown bugged out about 3:10 into the BYU-Toledo game. And who in their right mind counts on a college football game ending on schedule?

ESPN has been airing live college football since the BYU-Pitt game on Sept. 1, 1984. This shouldn't have come as a surprise. The network also set the kickoff time for BYU-Toledo, and assigned the broadcast crew.

Which begs the question: If Brown was on such a tight schedule, why bother to send him to Provo? It's not like ESPN doesn't have other college football analysts.

It was bizarre. And it made ESPN look sort of ridiculous.

Scott D. Pierce covers TV for The Salt Lake Tribune. Email him at spierce@sltrib.com; follow him on Twitter @ScottDPierce.