First, we should have taken a knee. Let me get that said first and foremost. And look I get the doom and gloom. I get where people's minds are at right now because I'm ****ed off too. I haven't been this shook about a Miami game since Terry Porter's flag. It's like being punched in the gut and stabbed in the back at the same time. It ******* sucks.
But all that said, I feel like it's important to be reminded that sometimes dumb luck just plays a factor. Human beings are really bad at understanding probabilities and randomness, it's just how we're wired. Random **** happens and we try to put some kind of reasoning and meaning behind it, it's just human nature to all of us.
But the fact is the odds of having what happened yesterday are astronomically low. Even with the corching. 999/1000 times this doesn't happen. So many things have to go horribly wrong in exactly the right sequence for what happened, it's difficult to wrap your mind around. You'll most likely never see anything like it ever again in your life.
Don Chaney had 132 career carries at UM and before that one, he had never fumbled the ball. That's 1/132 odds, to start us off. Then, they recover. That's 50/50 odds. So the odds of Chaney fumbling and the other team recovering are now 1/264. (1/132 * 1/2). Then there's the last minute drive GA Tech had to win the game. According to ESPN stats, teams with the ball with that much time remaining are successful 9.7% of the time. We'll say 10% to make it easy. Now our odds are at 1/2640.
So we could run the exact same sequence over and over.... end games by handing the ball to Chaney instead of kneeling the ball, and we'd likely only see the same result once every 2640 games. That means we could do the same thing every single game, and what we saw happen would only happen once every 250 years or so.
It's a corching blunder for sure. I'm not discounting that. But I feel like it's important to remember that sometimes dumb bad luck just is what it is. What happened to us is equivalent to getting hit by a bus at the same time as being struck by lightning and having a piano fall on our heads at the same time. It's ****ed up but you'll probably never see it again as long as you live.
We come out of this on the other side, and we still have a good team. We have a team with enough talent and good enough schemes to beat anyone on our schedule. As a fan, all I can do is hope that they show up in North Carolina dialed in and with something to prove.
