Few plays in football are more unusual than when an offensive player is stopped by anything other than a defensive player.
There are a number of wild and wacky ways this can happen.
Sometimes, an offensive player will drop the football in a celebratory fashion — before actually crossing the goal line. Sometimes, an offensive player will simply have a “Three Stooges” moment and trip over a piece of air. Sometimes offensive players run into their own teammates, with perhaps the most infamous example being the NFL’s “Butt Fumble” of 2012, starring then-Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.
But even seasoned football viewers may not have ever seen anything like what happened to Boston College quarterback Thomas Castellanos during Saturday’s college football game against Army.
Castellanos went viral after a clip of a second-quarter play began spreading across the internet.
In that clip, Castellanos takes off on a quarterback run on a second-and-9.
The promising scramble ultimately came up short, not because of any particular play by the Army Black Knights — but because of a collision with a referee.
Now, on-field collisions with referees are nothing new in football.
It’s almost unavoidable given the speed of the game, especially in recent years.
But when those collisions do involve referees, 99.99 percent of the time, the referee gets the far worse end of it, given that players are in full pads and typically much larger than referees.
This is the .01 percent that’s the exception:
— go to ➡️ collegefootballnetwork.com (@PickettsPool) October 7, 2023
As you can so clearly see, umpire Mark Wilson tried to avoid a scrambling Castellanos in the clip.
While trying to lean out of the way, Wilson seemingly leans his shoulder into Castellanos — dropping the quarterback like a linebacker.
Whatever fleeting sense of embarrassment that Castellanos may have felt in that moment was certainly washed away by game’s end, however.
Castellanos and the Boston College Eagles upended the Black Knights 27-24, with the Boston College quarterback scrambling for the go-ahead touchdown with less than a minute left to go in the game.
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Army will have a chance to get back on the winning track on Oct. 14, when the Black Knights host the Troy Trojans.
Boston College, meanwhile, will look to avoid any letdowns — and referees masquerading as linebackers — when the Eagles travel to face the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets on Oct. 21.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.