If you've watched enough football, you've seen enough loose balls bobbled, booted and ultimately lost by players with a clear shot at a recovery to understand why coaches, announcers and fans exhort players to "just fall on it!" as a matter of course. The ball doesn't bounce the way you expect, and the game doesn't get much more frustrating than watching an over-ambitious player give away a possession by trying to get ahold of the sporting equivalent of a fish flopping in a boat, in the name of making a play that almost certainly isn't there.
That's the rule: Just fall on it. So you can't really blame Arkansas freshman Julian Horton, after failing to come up with a clean scoop on his first attempt following a game-changing blocked punt by teammate Chris Gragg with a little over a minute to play in Tuesday night's Sugar Bowl, for taking it to heart. The ball was loose, and he fell on it.
In the moment, it still seemed like a clutch triumph: With the Razorbacks already on a 16-3 run that trimmed an 18-point deficit at the half to 31-26, Horton's recovery set up one of the top quarterbacks in the country inside the Buckeyes' 20-yard line with a golden chance at the winning touchdown. And it's certainly not on him that Ryan Mallett's failure to grasp Ohio State's zone blitz gave that opportunity away just two plays later:
Still, as what-ifs go, the failure to convert the block into a go-ahead touchdown has to be a particularly gnawing one for the Razorbacks. If there's a time that you don't just fall on it, this has to be it: The ball is in wide open field, with no Buckeye in the vicinity with any chance to make a recovery or stop Horton (or any of his teammates) from taking it to the end zone – and even if he did flub the recovery and Ohio State somehow managed to come up with it, the end result is still Arkansas ball with a chance to win. In this case, there's everything to gain by making a conscious effort to stay on your feet, and nothing to lose.
Razorback fans will remember the missed opportunity in their first BCS game for a long, long time, and Ohio State fans should, too: After watching the big halftime lead slowly evaporate, Cragg's block seemed destined to live on as the definitive moment in the most spectacular collapse in BCS history, a loss that would have only deepened the stigma of big game failure amid the most devastating "S-E-C!" chant ever. That's not the case – the Buckeyes are triumphant, bound for the top five at 12-1 – but the gap is only as wide as the firing synapse that reminded a freshman to just fall on it.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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