Depending on what happens this weekend, SMQ is considering regularly launching the "Kafkaesque Game of the Week," commemorating games marked by a senseless, disorienting narrative of existential dread, particularly those whose existence is plunged into an unbearable state of ever-elusive freedom under unmitigatable bureacratic control.
Last Monday, for instance, SMQ lamented the unresolved relationship between a wide receiver's feet and the end zone chalk, which resulted in the nullification of a potentially game-winning touchdown for UNLV at Iowa State, without explanation to indignant Rebel coach Mike Sanford, whose team protested onfield for 15 minutes as officials bailed before ruefully accepting the unbearable machinations of modern life.
This week, isolation from reality is embodied by Bob Stoops, whose faith in systemic security was rocked by successive onside kick and pass interference calls against his team with a one-touchdown lead in the final minute of Saturday's loss at Oregon:
"That's illegal touching and interfering with the reception. And then I see my guy get up with the football that's laying on the ground."
(Hat tip, The Wiz, via EDSBS)
In addition to the blatantly obvious illegal touching call, The Wizard of Odds also provides the first video suggesting SMQ was not just hearing things when he described the initial confusion over who had actually recovered the kick, a question that was not debated again after a brief mention during the chaos of the game and that has not been a part of highlights or Web debate - until now. Stoops says his man came away with the ball, and video confirms this is true - the question (not an academic one, despite the even more obvious illegal touch that necessitated it) is whether an Oregon player had managed to confirm possession prior to Oklahoma's recovery. SMQ, watching the game and now the video, sees no argument that this could be the case. Oklahoma was jobbed on every front.
Bob Stoops seeks to lay bare the inaccessibility of meaning (vis a vis the "law") and man's tenacious longing for it.
A commenter at TWOO notes that No. 15, Oregon's Patrick Chung, initially fell on the ball, and this was apparently true, but there was never any evidence he had sole possession of it at that point, and the video provided would seem to clearly suggest he did not.
This represents a problem for any and all voters, a question of precedent, if you will, which SMQ's posed on the sidebar to the right: is your decision determined by the official ledger, which tallies the 'W' for Oregon and elevates the Ducks accordingly, or by a more elusive sense of personal justice, in which case Oklahoma is credited with the cosmic victory theoretically decreed by unheeded rules? The answer could reveal the inviolable conviction of the true self at the core of an otherwise superficial being.
SMQ knows what he thinks - though his opinion is confined to the specifics of this case and should not be applied to different circumstances, such as, say, a blatant rip-off on the final play.