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Saturday night’s Ohio State-Northwestern game didn’t necessarily end in controversial fashion. Not on the field, anyway.
Ohio State won 40-30, and there was really no question that the score was legit. The referees made the correct call on Northwestern’s misguided final play, awarding the Buckeyes a touchdown on a fumble recovery in the end zone as time expired:
The problem is that lots of people — and I mean lots of them — bet Ohio State to cover at plus-6.5 points, and in an instant, every single one of them went from losers to winners, at Vegas’ expense.
When reached Sunday morning by FOX Sports, Jay Kornegay, the vice president of race and sports operations at the Las Vegas Hilton, estimated that Ohio State’s last-second touchdown — which turned a four-point margin into a 10-point game — could have resulted in as much as a $3 million to $4 million swing in Las Vegas alone.
And that’s to say nothing of the offshore betting sites that likely saw bettors wager along similar lines.
You’ll certainly hear reminders that it was Northwestern that was rocked by betting scandals in both basketball and football in the 1990s, but there’s no indication whatsoever that there was anything fishy afoot on Saturday evening.
Instead, just file this wacky conclusion away as your latest reminder that a game truly is never over until the final buzzer sounds — and, contrary to popular belief, the house doesn’t always win.
