NC State had a 99.9 percent win probability and six seconds to burn. CJ Bailey found the one outcome that lost the game.
The Wolfpack led Vanderbilt 31-28 late Saturday at FirstBank Stadium in Nashville, facing fourth-and-3 from inside their own 5-yard line with six seconds on the clock. The plan was an intentional safety. Give up two, keep the lead, go home.
Everything That Went Wrong in Four Seconds
Bailey took the snap and ran backward into his own end zone. Instead of stepping out the back or going down clean, he let himself get tackled inside the field of play. As he went down, Vanderbilt knocked the ball loose. Vanderbilt recovered it in the end zone. Touchdown, game over.
A walk-off fumble recovery to win a game the other team had already won. ESPN called it a new Music City Miracle, which undersells how avoidable it was.
He Had a Dozen Better Options
This is the part that will follow Bailey around. Taking an intentional safety is a legitimate call and coaches make it all the time. Executing it wrong is almost impossible, and he found the way.
He could have thrown the ball out of the stadium. He could have run out the back of the end zone and taken the safety cleanly. He could have simply gone to the ground on his own terms without a defender in position to punch the ball out. Any of those and NC State flies home 2-1 in a game nobody outside the two fanbases would remember.
Instead he handed Vanderbilt a possession, points and a win in the span of one snap.
The Cruel Part Is That He Played Well
Bailey threw for 275 yards and three touchdowns. He was the reason NC State was in position to win at all. The junior quarterback had a good day right up until the last play, and none of it will matter in how this game gets remembered.
That is the brutal arithmetic of quarterback. You can carry an offense for 59 minutes and still be the only name anybody says afterward if the final snap goes sideways.
Coaching Deserves a Share Here
Someone on that staff needed to make sure the quarterback knew exactly what the intentional safety looked like. Get out the back. Do not let anyone touch you. Do not go down in the field of play. That is a thirty-second conversation in a timeout, and there is no evidence it happened clearly enough.
NC State has historically been on the winning side of these late-game absurdities. Saturday flipped it, and it flipped it in the most public way a team can lose a football game.
Vanderbilt will take it. The Commodores did nothing wrong other than keep playing until the whistle, which is more than the team with the ball managed to do.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.