Pitt beat Virginia Tech 35-33, and the last thing that happened in that football game was a 36-yard field goal that officials ruled missed by inches. John Love's kick climbed up over the top of the upright. Everything after that was argument.
The cruelty here is pure geometry. From 36 yards a competent college kicker launches the ball high enough that it is still rising hard as it reaches the posts, and the uprights only go up so far. When the flight path is directly over the pipe instead of clearly inside or outside it, the sport asks three people standing underneath to decide, in real time, from the worst possible angle, which side of a three-inch-wide piece of steel a ball passed on while it was forty-odd feet in the air and moving. They saw outside. The Hokies saw a season.
I have watched enough of these to know the honest answer is that nobody in the stadium knew. Not the kicker, not the sideline, not the camera. That is not an indictment of the officials. It is an indictment of the design.
Checked the almanac: the NFL added five feet to its uprights for the 2014 season for exactly this reason, because the league kept asking human eyes to adjudicate a ball that vanished above the pipe. College football has kept living with the same sightline and the same prayer. Saturday night in this rivalry, the prayer came due.
And it is a rivalry, which is part of why this one stings in a specific way. Pitt and Virginia Tech spent years beating on each other in the Big East before the realignment carousel scattered them, Virginia Tech to the ACC in 2004, Pitt following in 2013, the two of them eventually landing back in the same league like a bad penny. Games between these programs have a habit of ending at a strange angle.
What comes next for Love is the part I actually care about. He was a few inches of air from being the story of the weekend in the good way, and instead he will spend a week carrying something no kicker earns. He does not deserve a single word of it. Teammates who got the ball to the 18-yard line have a long list of plays they would like back too, and none of them will get asked about theirs.
What I am watching: how Virginia Tech comes out of a loss that was decided by something nobody can prove, and whether this is the one that finally gets college football talking about taller posts.