Joel Klatt reacts to Notre Dame having 10 men on the field on final two plays

A record-breaking TV audience witnessed a tremendous football game that was ultimately decided by one mistake that simply cannot happen at the college level.

At least, that was college football analyst Joel Klatt’s take on the ending of the Notre Dame game against Ohio State in South Bend last weekend. On his show this week, Klatt discussed the final sequence between the Fighting Irish and Buckeyes, and could hardly understand how Marcus Freeman only sent 10 defenders onto the field not once, but twice on the deciding possession.

“You talk about being in a blender. (Emeka) Egbuka catches the ball at the one yard line, Ohio State races up and spikes the ball with seven seconds left,” Klatt said, retelling the final couple plays. “They are out of timeouts, they line up for the second down play, timeout Notre Dame. Notre Dame, out of a timeout, they play two snaps with 10 players on the field.”

The Fox Sports commentator just couldn’t fathom such a miscue.

“What are we doing?” he asked. “So your players played that hard for 59 minutes and 53 seconds and 10 players played the last seven seconds?”

When you break it down like that, it sounds even worse. For that reason, Klatt says over and over again that mistakes like those simply “cannot happen” — at the college level for sure, but even at lower levels, playing 10 guys on the final plays would be a massive black eye for any head coach.

“That cannot happen. It can’t happen. It can’t happen for Jones Junior High School, it can’t happen for Mater Dei down the road right here, one of the best high schools. It can’t happen for Mount Union in Div. III.

“It can’t happen for the JuCo, it can’t happen for a Group of Five and it certainly cannot happen with 10 million people watching in the biggest game of the college football day between Ohio State and Notre Dame. That cannot happen, period. I’m sick for them that it happened that way.”

Did you catch all those? That was nine iterations of the phrase “cannot happen” uttered by Klatt when breaking down that play. Clearly, he finds that personnel shortcoming as an absolute non-negotiable mistake. You simply can’t do it!

Alas, Notre Dame did. Marcus Freeman owned his mistakes in the postgame and all the Fighting Irish can do is learn from it and charge forward. After all, the season is still their oyster and an undefeated run through the remaining schedule would still certainly land ND in the College Football Playoff — especially if they can pick up some quality ACC wins the next two weeks at Duke and then at Louisville, as both clubs are 4-0 at the moment.