Greetings Gov. Cox:
I am a Notre Dame alumnus who graduated in 1964 with a B.A. in English. I had a good laugh at your remarks trolling my alma mater after BYU’s win on Oct. 17.
My view of football, at any level, is that teams win or lose games regardless of questionable judgments or downright obvious officiating errors by the refs. The refs generally get things right — and being human, they do make occasional mistakes.
In the average college level football game, there are about 120 to 140 offensive snaps. Every one of those plays affords both the offense and defense the chance to score a touchdown, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know the game of football. The plays where the refs get it wrong usually represent a couple percentage points of all the scoring opportunities for both the offenses and defenses over the course of a game.
Before the BYU vs Notre Dame game, I told my wife that I would not be surprised if BYU won. The Cougar football team has a lot of very talented players who have proven themselves to be a quite capable football team over the course of this season.
BYU won the game. They got a few breaks from the refs — one just before the end of the first half and two right at the end of the game. But they beat Notre Dame over the course of over 100 opportunities Notre Dame had to put the game away.
However, BYU defensive lineman Justin Kirkland admitted to committing a foul by saying “hut,” causing the Notre Dame quarterback fumble recovered by BYU at the end of the first half. He may have told teammates he was going to do it. He did it. And then he admittedly lied to a ref when he denied doing it. Worse yet, he lied when he told a ref that the Notre Dame player who called attention to his foul was lying. And in his interview on CougarConnect after the game, Kirkland was laughing at what he had done and considered it all funny.
BYU has an honor code for all of its students. The second point of the honor code, according to the Wikipedia page on BYU, is “be honest.”
I’ve contacted BYU via email, pointing out that if their football coach hasn’t dismissed Kirkland from the team, he, the head coach, should be fired, and that, in any event, BYU should officially forfeit the game to Notre Dame or expect to live in the hypocrisy of a nonresponse to this violation of BYU’s honor code by Kirkland, and perhaps other Cougar football team members.
Time for you to troll BYU about respect for the game of football and BYU’s honor code. I doubt that BYU and its fans would be laughing about being called out and called to account for Kirkland’s trashing their honor code and putting the entire LDS organization and community at risk of defending the indefensible.
I look forward to another good laugh over another public troll from you.
John Scott, Lolo, Montana