30 years ago today. A good read on the infamous 5th down.

Posted on: October 6, 2020 at 09:04:15 CT

They say that comedy is just tragedy plus a lot of time. I was there, my friend was arrested down on the field. I still need more time before I can laugh at this.

College football’s biggest blunder turns 30: The Fifth Down Game

By Peter Baugh Oct 1, 2020 (The Athletic)

COLUMBIA, Mo. — J.C. Louderback mostly uses his garage to string tennis rackets for the local school district, and his wife, Denise, comes in to do laundry. The space needs cleaning, but somewhere tucked away rest a pair of over-the-shoulder bags filled to the brim with decades-old letters — relics of the biggest officiating blunder in college football history.

Louderback, now 86, was in no hurry to read the letters at the time of their arrival. But one day, around 10 years ago, he stumbled upon the gray and purple bags while cleaning the garage. He sat down and, two decades after the infamous Fifth Down Game, began to read.

About half offered support, telling him he was a good ref, even if he’d made a big mistake. The others ripped him and his crew. How could they allow five downs in a Division I college football game? One jokingly offered him membership to the University of Colorado booster club.

He accepted the blame.

“That’s where it’s at now and will be forever, I guess,” he said in a phone interview from his Arkansas City, Kan., home.

Louderback isn’t bitter as the Oct. 6, 1990, game between Missouri and Colorado nears its 30th anniversary. And though he moved on with his life — he continued to coach tennis, teach calculus and referee — he still wonders what would have happened had the then-No. 12 Buffaloes not gotten an extra down, allowing them to score the winning touchdown as time expired.
“I hated that it happened,” he said.

The Fifth Down’s legacy goes beyond the eventual national champion Buffaloes and Mizzou, the team left feeling cheated. The game represents rage, regret and the consequence of human error: a study of small mistakes changing lives and altering history.

Imagine if Jon Boman hadn’t slipped. The Colorado tight end could have walked into the end zone had he just kept his balance. His winning touchdown would have become a footnote in the story of Colorado’s national title season, and the Fifth Down Game never would have existed.

But Boman did slip. His left foot gave from under him as he crossed the first-down marker, and he fell forward on the slick Missouri turf. Backup quarterback Charles Johnson lined his team up at the 3-yard line and spiked the ball, stopping the clock at 28 seconds. The Buffaloes still trailed 31-27 against a pesky Missouri team that entered the Big Eight matchup as heavy underdogs.
“That field was awful,” then-Missouri linebacker Mike Ringgenberg said recently. “I don’t care if you played on that field day in and day out, practiced on it, played on it. Your footing didn’t get any better. You just learned to slip and get back up.”

In 1985, Missouri installed Omniturf, which used a base layer of sand, at Faurot Field. In warm weather, the sand rose to the top, making the ground hard and slippery. Johnson compared it to a gravel-top surface, and it became unpopular with both Tigers and visiting players before its removal in 1995.

Gary Barnett, Colorado’s quarterbacks coach in 1990, remembers watching his players slip during pregame warmups. He looked to the Missouri sideline, where he said he noticed the Tigers wearing long cleats that were better equipped for the surface. His team returned to the locker room in a near panic. The Buffaloes ran an option-based system; they needed good footing to make the quick cuts on which their offense thrived.

“I was thinking, ‘The condition of the field is going to be an impediment for me to have a great game,’” said Johnson, who was playing in place of Darian Hagan, the injured starter. “As a backup quarterback, the last thing you want to do is mess it up.”

Coming off an 11-1 record in 1989, Colorado entered the 1990 season with national title hopes, but it stumbled early, tying Tennessee and losing to Illinois. The Buffaloes needed a win against Missouri, a team coming off a 2-9 season and trying to get its footing under second-year coach Bob Stull.
Missouri and Colorado threw haymakers back and forth all game, and the Tigers scored with 2:32 remaining to take a four-point lead. But Johnson led the Buffaloes on a drive from their own 12-yard line, and he thought he had the game won on his pass to Boman. In some ways, though, the slip felt fitting. Johnson said it was emblematic of what went on all day.
After the spike, Johnson put the ball in the hands of Colorado’s best player, running back Eric Bieniemy, now the offensive coordinator for the Chiefs. Bieniemy rumbled up the middle on second down, but a cadre of Missouri defensemen met him at the 1-yard line. Buffaloes coach Bill McCartney, a Missouri ’62 alumnus, called timeout with 18 seconds left.
The down marker never changed to third down.

Louderback walked to the Colorado sideline, where McCartney wanted to talk. The Buffaloes were planning to attempt a three-play sequence they called “Geronimo,” and the coach told Louderback that if Colorado got stopped at the goal line on its first play attempt, the referee shouldn’t let Missouri players lie around to run down the clock and let time expire.
According to Johnson and Barnett, that wasn’t all. They remember McCartney verifying he had enough time — and downs — to run the sequence.
“He pointed to the clock,” Johnson said. “Then he pointed to the down marker and said ‘It’s second down. We’re going to run a three-play series.’”
“I heard Coach McCartney tell the official what we were going to do, and the official said ‘OK,’” said Barnett, who went to Missouri and celebrated the Tigers’ 1968 Gator Bowl reunion before the game.
Health prevented McCartney from being interviewed for this story — at age 80, he suffers from late-onset dementia/Alzheimer’s — but in previous interviews, the coach’s story matched that of his players and assistant. He never would have run a three-play series if he had known the correct down, his son Mike said.
Only center Jay Leeuwenburg spoke up in the Colorado huddle, according to Johnson, telling his teammates that it was really third down. The Buffaloes didn’t have enough downs to run the full series.
“He began to explain, and at that point, the officials said ‘bring them out,’” said Johnson, who was unaware of the extra down, especially after hearing McCartney’s conversation with Louderback.
“I said, ‘Shut up, Jay!’”
The next spring, surrounded by his fellow coaches at the Big Eight’s annual meetings, Stull stood up to talk. First, he wanted to mix in some humor.
“Before I start talking about next year’s team,” he remembers saying, “let’s talk about the Fifth Down Game.”
The room went silent. The coaches stared nervously at Stull, who later went on to become UTEP’s athletic director and recently moved back to Columbia.
“I was upset because we lost. I was really upset at the way we lost,” he said, building to the punchline. “But what really upset me was when Bill McCartney and his staff carried the officials off the field on their shoulders.”
Everyone in the room laughed, Stull remembers. Everyone except McCartney.
Imagine if Louderback hadn’t stopped the clock. Time would have expired as Colorado tried to get its offense set, and Missouri’s fans would have rushed the field. No one would have remembered the incorrect down marker.
But Louderback did stop the clock. Missouri halted Bieniemy at the 1-yard line, creating a pile at the edge of the end zone. Stull insisted none of his players tried to hold Colorado players down as the clock ticked, but Louderback halted time for six seconds as the pile dissipated.
“We did lay on them,” Ringgenberg said. “We were trying to get the clock to run.”
Stull believes Colorado never should have gotten another play, but with the clock running again and only four seconds left, Johnson got his players lined up. He spiked the ball with only two seconds remaining. The Buffaloes, their national title hopes on the line, had time for one more play.
But, unbeknownst to the officials, they had already used all four of their downs: the spike and the Bieniemy run before the timeout, then the Bieniemy run and spike after.
Then-Missouri offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter, now in the same role with the Falcons, watched from the press box above and remembers Mike Church, the Tigers defensive coordinator, screaming that Colorado had already used all its downs. Columnist Bernie Miklasz wrote after the game in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that 20 writers in the press box immediately realized that the chain official hadn’t flipped the down marker. Some of the crowd of 46,000 had already started rushing from the stands, ready to celebrate a victory.
“Truth be told,” Koetter said earlier this year, “we had them beat.”
On Missouri’s sideline, Stull thought it might be fifth down, but he didn’t stop play. It didn’t matter if it was fourth, fifth or 10th down, he thought at the time. The Tigers just needed to keep Colorado out of the end zone.
The only people who mattered in that moment — the officials and the 22 players on the field — geared up for one final play.
Of all the hands involved in the Fifth Down Game, it’s a cruel twist of fate that one belonged to Rich Montgomery, the head of the chain crew. Now 76, he grew up in Columbia, buying 25-cent tickets to watch home games on the school’s famed Rock M hill. He played trumpet in the Missouri marching band as a student in the ’60s, and his son played football for the Tigers in the ’80s.
He loves the Tigers as much as anyone.
Responsible for holding the down marker, Montgomery’s job included switching the number when the referees gave him the signal. When McCartney called timeout, that signal never came.
“There have been many times over the last 50 years that I worked on the sideline that I reminded (officials), ‘Hey, Ref, it’s third down,’ or ‘Hey, Ref, it’s second down,’” said Montgomery, who volunteered on the chain crew from 1968-2018, missing only two home games. “We communicated all the time, but that particular time I missed it. I just flat missed it.”
So when Colorado returned from timeout, Montgomery’s marker said second down, not third. When Colorado lined up for its final play, he had no clue something was wrong. Walking off the field after the game, Louderback asked him if they’d allowed an extra down. No way, he replied.
“That’s about all I remember,” he said. “I try to forget as much as I can.”

The autographs and picture, which hung in an insurance agency for years, tell the story. (Courtesy of Rich Montgomery)
And yet he doesn’t shy away from reminders. Before retiring from his job at State Farm as an insurance agent, he kept a fifth-down marker in his office bathroom, right next to a printed painting of the game’s final play. Over the years, he’d gotten both head coaches to autograph the print, which includes Montgomery holding the down marker.
“Did you know?” Stull scribbled above his signature.
“They tend to even out,” McCartney wrote before scrawling his name in neat cursive.
Imagine if head linesman Ron Demaree had ruled Johnson down short of the goal line. Missouri students would have run gleefully onto the field, mobbing the Tigers players. Colorado would have been out of the national title picture. Thirty years later, only die-hard fans would know the play came on fifth down.
But Demaree didn’t rule Johnson short. He jogged toward the pile after the quarterback keeper on fourth-and-1, and he threw his hands in the air. Touchdown.
Colorado 33, Missouri 31. Final.
Colorado had arranged the play sequence — after the run up the middle and spike to stop the clock — to end with “38 Block H,” an option play with Johnson designed to make the defense play horizontally.
“I was so anxious to get that 1 yard, I actually turned the play up sooner than I should have, which made it a contested call,” said Johnson, who believes he did get the ball past the goal line.
But ask Missouri fans, and they’ll say he fell short. Church said after the game that Johnson didn’t score. Koetter believes Johnson was down. Stull thinks so, too. So does Montgomery.
Ringgenberg, who pulled Johnson to the ground, still knows what he could have done better on the play. He took a flatter angle toward Johnson than he should have. He should have been more aggressive when penetrating. He thinks he pulled the quarterback down before the goal line, but if he’d taken the right angle, maybe then there wouldn’t have been a debate.
Chaos overtook Faurot Field as Demaree signaled touchdown. Missouri students, thinking Johnson fell short, ran onto the field, then surrounded Demaree when they realized his verdict, screaming in his ear. Louderback remembers a “little old man” running toward him, getting in his face and yelling that the refs had screwed up. They’d allowed a fifth down.
Considering its historical impact, it feels funny that the game didn’t air nationally. With a slate of bigger matchups that weekend, the game didn’t make the cut for national TV. But in Denver, KCNC broadcast the game, leaving behind footage of the notorious afternoon.
The referees deliberated for 20 minutes, ultimately deciding they’d made the right decision. Colorado had to return to the field, but only to attempt the extra point. They fell on the ball, eliminating the chance of a Missouri return and ending the game.
“I hope you’re right,” Stull remembers saying to the crew. “Because if not, it’s really going to be ugly for you guys.”
It was. Fans tore down the goal posts — maybe thinking their team had won, maybe out of anger — and security had to block the officials’ changing room from fans, the Post-Dispatch reported the next morning.
“The scene didn’t require riot gear,” Miklasz wrote in his postgame column, “but it was dangerously close to exploding.”
Now 78, Demaree doesn’t want to talk about the Fifth Down Game. He didn’t mean for it to unfold the way that it did. None of the officials did.
“Guys are just wanting to go on with their lives,” he said.
The game haunted the head linesman in the months after the game. Finally, one of his friends — a former official — got through to him.
“Ron, you didn’t kill anybody,” Demaree recalls him saying. “You didn’t do it intentionally. Go on down the road and learn to live with it.”
As Montgomery drove onto the I-70 West ramp after the game, settling in for a two-hour drive to his home in Kansas City, he heard radio announcer Bill Wilkerson break down the final series on the postgame show. He went play by play, and for the first time, Montgomery realized the crew had made a mistake.
The chain crew member pulled the family station wagon to the side of the road. He vomited.
“The drive home was pretty quiet after that,” said his son Jeff, also a member of the chain crew.
“I was so upset that I was a part of that,” Rich Montgomery said.
The game had obvious historical implications. Without the win, Colorado doesn’t earn a share of the national title with Georgia Tech that year. And who knows what the victory could have meant for Missouri. The Tigers blew out No. 21 Arizona State the week before, and Stull believes the Fifth Down Game zapped his players’ momentum.
They also had to hear about the game the entire next week. TV analysts and local radio hosts broke it down. The entire week of preparation for No. 7 Nebraska was “meh,” according to Ringgenberg. The team couldn’t overcome such a devastating loss and dropped four of their last six games, including a 48-point loss to the Cornhuskers.
“If we had beaten Colorado, I think that really would have propelled the program forward and turned it around,” said former Tigers offensive lineman Mike Bedosky, whose position coach during the Fifth Down Game — Andy Reid — now coaches the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. “But it’s one of those things: ‘OK, it’s Mizzou, here we go again. Another setback.’ And I think that’s kind of what we fell into.”
“There’s always one of those parallel universes where you’d love to see what kind of transpired had we won that game,” Ringgenberg said. “But unfortunately, we got kicked in the gut.”
McCartney fanned the flames after the game. He deflected questions about the extra down by complaining about the Omniturf at Missouri, calling it unplayable. That frustrated Ringgenberg. Both teams played on it, after all, and he thought the coach should’ve simply given credit to Missouri for fighting hard.

Bill McCartney coached Colorado from 1982 to 1994. (Stephen Dunn / Getty Images)
Missouri fans held McCartney’s comments against him — “he got more mail than Santa Claus that year,” Stull said — but as the years went by, the former Colorado coach grew remorseful.
“I went to school at Missouri, OK?” he told ESPN in 2010. “I’m an alum, OK? And all of this has tarnished that. That is a regret that I’ll carry with me to my grave. I wasn’t gracious in victory. … So I say this to all the people of Missouri, I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I behaved with immaturity. I should’ve handled that graciously, and I regret I didn’t uphold the tradition of being a Missouri Tiger better in that time of struggle.”
McCartney’s postgame comments might have been regrettable, but his team won the game within the parameters the referees laid down. The Buffaloes coach didn’t know it was fourth down when Johnson spiked the ball because he said he made sure with Louderback that he had time to run his three-play set.
And, of course, the down marker was wrong.
“If I was on Missouri’s sideline that day, that would be a really bitter way to lose,” son Mike McCartney said. “I do have empathy for Missouri. I do have understanding. But Colorado didn’t have an advantage.”
The historic gaffe hasn’t left the people involved. Stull’s wife still doesn’t like talking about it. Johnson called it the defining game of his championship season, and Ringgenberg can still get worked up about it if he’s had a few beers.
And then, of course, there’s Louderback, who kept all those letters decades after the angry phone calls stopped. He started working Conference USA games before his retirement in 1999, but even his new crew members never let him forget what happened Oct. 6, 1990.
One in particular would joke with him periodically. He’d check in with Louderback throughout the game — Let’s make sure we get the downs right.

........

Oh and Johnson never crossed the goal line. He was flat on his back, down, and then reached the ball over the goal, with the line judge standing right there watching it all.

Edited by Danno at 09:06:38 on 10/06/20