Josh Pate: Several officials, referees called Big Ten’s controversial explanation a ‘pile of garbage’

Josh Pate: Several officials, referees called Big Ten’s controversial explanation a ‘pile of garbage’

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Josh Pate: Several officials, referees called Big Ten’s controversial explanation a ‘pile of garbage’
Credit: Josh Pate's College Football Show

For all intents and purposes, Josh Pate is the voice of college football.

If it’s not Kirk Herbstreit or Joel Klatt, or even Pat McAfee, it’s the Columbus, Georgia native who built an entire media career from a Facebook Live stream a decade ago, growing Josh Pate’s College Football Show from a side hustle with 15 viewers into a daily program now distributed by On3 Sports, with regular appearances on ESPN’s Get Up, and a new weekly show alongside Taylor Lewan and Will Compton.

On Sunday, Pate turned that reach toward the Big Ten, as he dedicated the opening segment of his eponymous college football show to the conference’s handling of Michigan’s 13-12 win over Western Michigan. He said he’d spent that same morning fielding calls from several officials and referees, all of whom wanted him to convey, in no uncertain terms, exactly how disgraceful they considered the Big Ten’s response.

After Michigan escaped with a 13-12 win on a Hail Mary that, according to NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay, shouldn’t have happened at all — his own clock, supposedly synced to the stadium’s, showed the ball still in the air when it hit zero, and he said he had no explanation for how the Big Ten’s replay system found a different number — the conference offered a statement nearly two hours after the fact, claiming that Western Michigan’s No. 18 had made contact with the ball while one second still showed on the clock.

“I would love for someone in the league office to look me in the eye and tell me if Western Michigan was at midfield heaving a prayer up and that exact same set of circumstances were to have played out, that this is the way it would have gone down,” Pate said. “I have been on the phone with several officials and several referees this morning who wanted to make sure that they articulated how much of a [cover your ass] move this is, how big of a pile of garbage that is from the Big Ten league office, and how egregious, like beyond the pale, horrifically bad the machinations of the way that was handled last night were.”

Pate pointed to how the Big Ten navigated the fallout from Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s case earlier this year. Sorsby admitted to placing 40 bets totaling roughly $90,000 on his own team’s games across four seasons, including as a freshman at Indiana in 2022, before a Lubbock judge granted him a temporary injunction in June restoring his eligibility. Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen, whose Big Ten program was among the first to react, declared that “we are not scheduling [Texas Tech] moving forward,” and Big Ten athletic directors met with commissioner Tony Petitti to discuss a league-wide mandate against playing the Red Raiders in any sport, all in the name of protecting the game’s integrity, before ultimately deciding against it.

“Hold up, you’re telling me the conference that just this past spring considered issuing a league-wide mandate not to schedule Texas Tech after the Sorsby stuff because of, wait for it, integrity of the game, is expecting me and a skeptical public to believe after two hours and a Canva edit later that they’ve explained away the problem here,” Pate said. “And we’re going to wait two hours after the game. We’re going to tell you guys, no, no, no, no, no, there’s another clock, and it’s a magic clock. And truthfully, we don’t have to tell you where the clock is. We don’t have to tell you who runs it. We didn’t even have to tell you it exists. You’re blessed that we’re even communicating this with you. Transparency, after all.”

The Big Ten had already branded itself as an industry leader on transparency this season, announcing it would give networks live audio and video access to its replay center for select Friday games, following the ACC’s lead from a year earlier. But according to Pate, the conference’s actual behavior in the early hours of Sunday morning looked less like transparency and more like a favor being extended to a skeptical public that never asked to be indebted.

“Why is transparency so important, ladies and gentlemen? It’s important because if you don’t have integrity of game and outcome, then you don’t have a sport,” Pate said. “That’s why it shouldn’t be in the Big Ten’s hands. That’s why a billion-dollar industry shouldn’t have a nickel-and-dime rules enforcement mechanism attached to it, but that’s what college football officiating is.

“It’s so easy to shout those words when it’s not in your backyard, when it’s about someone in Lubbock, Texas. And by the way, I didn’t have any problem with what they were saying about it, because I didn’t like the Sorsby situation either. But then it happens right there in your backyard, and instead of doing the right thing, you contribute to the thing.”

So, the Big Ten can insist that one second remained on the clock. It can insist its replay officials got the call right. What it can’t reasonably expect, as Pate made clear, is for a skeptical public, or the officials who called him that morning, to simply take its word for it.

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