What Big Ten’s Bill Carollo would do same, differently on infamous invalid fair catch call in Iowa-Minnesota game

INDIANAPOLIS — Cooper DeJean’s invalid fair catch — the infamous one in Iowa’s loss to Minnesota — has stayed fresh in the minds of many from the Hawkeye State.

“I still think it wasn’t a fair catch,” DeJean said earlier this year while at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis.

A few months later and a few blocks south of where DeJean made those comments, the Big Ten has been singing a different tune when looking back at the influential call — one that was made by the replay official upstairs.

“Once any waving happens, the ball is going to be dead,” said Bill Carollo, the Big Ten’s coordinator of football officials, at the conference’s media days.

It was a “standard rule that’s reviewable,” Carollo said, and the replay official “properly” overturned the initial call and ruled it an invalid fair catch.

DeJean was pointing with his right arm while appearing to wave below shoulder level with his left arm, perhaps to make sure the rest of the return team stayed away from the bouncing punt. (After all, Iowa suffered a turnover earlier in the season when a punt went off the back of one of the other players on the return unit.)

“You can point, but you can’t point one arm and then wave the other way to get away,” Carollo said.

Carollo said “we’ve called it before.” Before, however, usually doesn’t affect a potential game-winning touchdown in a heated rivalry. That’s not to mention the job implications for Brian Ferentz, considering it was his last game before finding out he would not be retained after the 2023 season.

“We let it go through, and of course, the results were a touchdown,” Carollo said. “So then that looks like, ‘Who’s making this call? And why are you making that call two minutes after the touchdown?’”

Carollo has watched the play “a lot of times from a lot of different angles” and did make a mea culpa. It’s not the mea culpa many Hawkeye fans want to hear, though.

“What we didn’t do properly was the back judge, the person covering the return man, when he caught that ball, the whistle should have been blown dead, and the play was over,” Carollo said.

Had the back judge done that (and stopped the touchdown play from even starting to unfold), “we wouldn’t have the conversation.”

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Nine months later in Indianapolis, though, the call seems to mostly be White River water under the New York Street bridge.

“We’ve all moved on,” Carollo said. “I’ve talked with Coach (Ferentz) and the staff at Iowa and so on. They didn’t like it. … We did call it against Minnesota that same season.”

Tweaks to replay system in 2024

Should a call like the DeJean invalid fair catch happen again in 2024, the replay process will be somewhat different.

Instead of the replay official upstairs making the final call on reviewed plays, a Big Ten official at the conference’s new replay center in Chicago will have the final say, Carollo said. (The new replay center replaces the Big Ten’s temporary solution in Pittsburgh, where replay operations contractor DVSport is located.)

Before the time comes for a final decision, it is a largely similar process as before.

“Everything on the field remains the same,” Carollo said. “The referee will have a headset when there’s a stoppage. He’ll come over, and he’ll talk to the folks upstairs. … But at the same time, he’ll be in contact with Chicago.”

The referee, the in-stadium replay official and one of the Big Ten’s officiating supervisors in Chicago will be the three voices during replay reviews.

“Of course, if we have a communications issue or problem, we still have people at the stadium that are more than capable — they’ve done it since the early 2000s — to make that call themselves,” Carollo said.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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