Code of Ethics Takes a Back Seat When Higher Stakes Are at Risk

In a fit of economic positive thinking and selflessness last month, my wife bought me a quite remarkable present to cover my birthday, anniversary, Christmas, Valentine and Columbus Day: a year’s pass on Continental Airlines. Although a number of restrictions apply, the pass gives me the freedom--within those restrictions--to fly just about anywhere I want within the continental United States.

I haven’t yet got quite accustomed to the possibilities this opens up. Although seeing my grandchildren in Colorado--perhaps more often than their parents would like to have me underfoot--came first and foremost to mind, I chose for my inaugural trip a second annual football visit to my alma mater at the University of Missouri. And darned if I didn’t end up right in the middle of one of the more provocative sports controversies of the year--or any year.

Because I’m hooked up through ties of many years’ standing to the good-ol’-boy network in Missouri, I was able to watch the game from the press box. Seated next to me--although I didn’t know it until much later--were the commissioner and the supervisor of officials for the Big 8 conference.

Missouri’s opponent was last year’s Big 8 champion, nationally ranked Colorado. I had a gut feeling the game was going to be close, even though Missouri--which has gone through more than a decade of lean football years--was a 15-point underdog. Sometimes I let sentiment get in the way of good judgment.

But my instincts turned out to be right on target. Missouri played Colorado--which opened its season this year against Tennessee at Anaheim Stadium--to a standstill, and with two minutes to go scored a touchdown that gave Mizzou a 31-27 lead. Then followed a series of events that made every sports highlight show in the nation that Saturday night and was still the sole topic of conversation on the Missouri campus when I left on Monday.

Colorado took the ensuing kick-off and came charging back down the field, using all of its timeouts in the process. With 18 seconds to play and a first down at the Missouri 3-yard-line, the Colorado quarterback spiked the ball to stop the clock. The down marker should have been changed but inexplicably wasn’t. In the tension and confusion that followed, Colorado ran two plays and Missouri stopped both of them. There were eight seconds on the clock when the second running play was stacked up short of the goal line. The clock should have been allowed to run out, but the officials--again inexplicably--stopped it.

On what was actually the fourth down, Colorado spiked the ball again with two seconds showing on the clock. Given an extra down and extra time, Colorado ran one more play and the officials--after considerable hesitation--signaled a touchdown. Colorado had just stolen the game from Missouri.

What happened after that was chaotic. Thousands of students who had waited for years for a substantial Missouri victory poured out of the stands and attacked the goal posts, thinking Missouri had won, then turning angry when they learned differently. They had been chanting “Fifth (bleeping) down” throughout the last few seconds of the game. The commissioner--who had seen it all happen and should have taken charge--slipped out of his chair beside me and disappeared, not to be heard from again until he was in the safety of his office the following day.

The officials huddled on the goal line, trying to get the teams--which had left the field--back out for the point-after-touchdown try. Meanwhile, several of the Missouri coaches railed at them, and a couple of the players who had made that magnificent goal-line stand had to be restrained. It took 15 minutes before enough players were returned to the field to go through the charade of the point after, with Colorado simply grounding the ball so Missouri would have no chance of blocking it and picking up two points with a runback. Then a police escort took the officials off the field.

What intrigues me most of all--once my Missouri emotions are put aside--are the attitudes that were struck after the game. They say a great deal about the bankrupt moral state of big-time sports as well as what a recent study on “The Ethics of American Youth” called “the undeniable weakening moral fiber of our country.” Those attitudes should be weighed in the light of one simple fact: By every ethical yardstick, Missouri won the game.

There is no dispute about the fact that Colorado scored on an extra and illegal down. Pictures released after the game also show rather clearly that even on the fifth down, the Colorado ball carrier did not cross the goal line but rather pushed the ball across over his head after he was down. And there is no question in my mind that the officials should have allowed the clock to run out on Colorado’s last legal running play, thereby ending the game before the controversy could take place.

So what came out of the Colorado locker room? Coach Bill McCartney--a Missouri alumnus who co-authored a book last year that stressed the strength he drew from his Christian ethics--ignored the extra down, the courage and disappointment of the Missouri defenders, the confusion of the officials--and railed exclusively about what he called the unplayable condition of the field that caused his players to slip repeatedly.

He was heard saying to an assistant, “Did we use five downs? They can’t take it away from us, can they?” When it was suggested to him that the ethical thing to do was forfeit the game to Missouri, he called the notion “absurd.”

There was a precedent for such a move. The exact same situation arose in 1940 when nationally-ranked Cornell beat Dartmouth on a game-ending fifth-down play. Although it broke an 18-game winning streak, Cornell forfeited the game to Dartmouth the following day. But that was in another time, another league and another moral climate.

In 1990, several million dollars of Orange Bowl money and a setback to a Colorado football program that has only recently reached the big time were at stake. No wonder soft-headed ethics are regarded as absurd. And no wonder the commissioner fled the heat so he could announce later that no machinery existed to return the victory to Missouri--but he was suspending the seven officials involved. Big deal.

The ethics study (as reported last week in The Times’ View section) found that 39% of college freshman considered financial success “important or essential” in 1970, but this figure had jumped to 75% today, and that during the same period the incidence of student cheating had increased commensurately.

Said the report’s author, former law professor Michael Josephson: “These are not people who had some genetic disposition toward immoral conduct. But they grew up in a society where misbehavior was all around them, where people were not enforcing the rules of ethics.”

The cynics will scoff at all this, and that’s OK. I just hope they ponder briefly the ethical example that has been put before the students on these two campuses.

There is, it should be pointed out, one more place for the buck to stop.

Nothing has been heard from the head honcho of the University of Colorado. The occupant of this academic and administrative aerie could come out from behind the protective shield offered by the Big 8 commissioner’s office and strike a blow for ethics by giving the game back to its rightful winner. Such an act would be of substantial importance to a lot of young people in this nation, but I’m not holding my breath. If the verdict stands, Colorado still has a shot at that Orange Bowl dough.