Minnesota head football coach P.J. Fleck made sure to share his side of the story today on the invalid fair catch signal that wiped out Cooper DeJean’s potential game-winning, 54-yard punt return touchdown in Iowa’s 12-10 loss versus the Gophers.
Speaking with the media ahead of the Gophers’ home date this Saturday against Michigan State, Fleck expounded on his thoughts about the replay ruling that impacted the outcome in the battle for the Floyd of Rosedale.
Naturally, Fleck wasn’t about to say that the officials got it wrong.
“Well, there’s nothing controversial about it, nothing controversial. Offsides is offsides, a false start’s a false start, a hold is a hold, an invalid fair catch signal is an invalid fair catch signal. Now the way the rule states is invalid fair catch, so everybody thinks it’s above your shoulder and has to look like a fair catch.
“That’s not part of the rule. The other part of the rule that was implemented years ago is the poison rule. When you poison or Peter any call, you cannot advance that ball. You can point to a ball, that’s fine. But, with one hand, you can’t shoo away people at all. You can’t do that. We got called for that weeks ago if you remember. We shooed people away from the ball, caught it, wanted to return it, and it was blown dead,” Fleck said.
The Gophers’ seventh-year head coach also pushed back against the narrative that the replay was initially to see if DeJean stayed in bounds and then morphed into a review on DeJean’s invalid fair catch signal.
“Who said he stepped out of bounds and they were reviewing that? Well, you said assumption. I was never told about out of bounds. I was told when they came over to tell me that it was, they were reviewing whether he fair caught it or not,” Fleck said.
Fleck did feel that the officials should have blown the play dead immediately.
“The only thing that should have happened—and I’m not a referee, nor am I blaming anyone—is it should have been blown dead right there. Don’t even let that play happen, because it doesn’t exist. The play doesn’t even exist, because it’s a poison and a Peter call, and it’s a dead ball. No controversy about it,” Fleck said.
One piece that even upset Iowa fans will probably agree about: the Hawkeyes still wound up with the football at their own 46-yard line with one timeout and a chance to go win the game.
The Gophers made several final plays after the review to seal it.
“I mean, you still had to go play football. That play did not exist, right, so you still had to go play football. Next play, our players respond, we have a sack. Then, we have an interception.
“You know, you get pulled over for speeding, ‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, you were going 25 miles per hour over the speed limit.’ ‘Well, I was just keeping up with the flow of traffic.’ I mean, we still had to make plays. We still had to go make plays. Right, and again, as I said before, I mean, we had three takeaways, we didn’t have any turnovers, they had 11 yards rushing, they had 127 yards of total offense. We had 113 rushing yards. We were four-of-five in the field goal unit,” Fleck said.
Here’s the full sequence of Fleck answering the media’s questions on Monday about the invalid fair catch signal that erased DeJean’s potential heroics.
Iowa has this week off to collect itself, get healthy and then make a push for the stretch run.
The Hawkeyes (6-2, 3-2 Big Ten) will return to action the following week in Week 10 of the college football season when Iowa travels to Wrigley Field to battle Northwestern (3-4, 1-3 Big Ten) on Nov. 4 at 2:30 p.m. The game will stream on Peacock.
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