“I think this game is over,” said play-by-play announcer Elise Woodward during Monday night’s Michigan-Oregon women’s basketball game. You’re imagining, maybe, that an electric Syla Swords shooting night gave Michigan a 50-point lead at halftime, leaving Oregon head coach Kelly Graves with no choice but to yank his starters and wave the white flag of over-ness. A likely scenario. But Woodward said these words in a tie game with 5.2 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter. This would seem to be one of the least “over” situations ever. When Woodward said the game was over, she suspected this quarter had literally already ended, and that the game needed to be sent to overtime.
After close to 40 minutes of heinous free-throw shooting and long scoring droughts, Michigan and Oregon were tied at 69. The Ducks had clawed back from a 16-point hole at halftime to tie the game with 1:30 left, and it would stay that way as the teams frantically exchanged misses. The Wolverines defended well enough to force a long and doomed Oregon possession so that Michigan got the ball back with 21 seconds left. After they’d dribbled the clock down to 12 and taken a timeout, Michigan began a long and doomed possession of their own. Swords tried breaking down a defender with 5.2 seconds left, to little success. She was left to heave something up with 5.2 seconds left. Her teammate Te’Yala Delfosse grabbed the offensive rebound with 5.2 seconds left, and got her own putback attempt up with 5.2 seconds left, at which point someone finally realized the clock had stopped at 5.2 seconds.
So began the long official convention to determine whether this quarter was over or not. The dramatic announcement proved Woodward correct. “Upon review, the game clock stopped at 5.2 seconds. After re-timing the play, the 5.2 seconds expired, [pause, for Oregon fan applause] and therefore we will go to overtime.” The official box score shows a missed Swords field goal attempt with :05 remaining, though she very clearly did not take a shot within .2 seconds of the clock stopping. Some crude stopwatch testing placed the attempt closer to :01 or less remaining. Let this be a lesson in the limits of the archive: Future generations may never know how much time was truly left when Syla Swords missed a jumper in a late December basketball game.
My first instinct was to feel, as Woodward did, that I’d never seen anything like it before. But as I considered my women’s sports fandom, I realized that it’s treated me to an exotic assortment of clock malfunctions and officiating errors. I have seen so many things like it before. An entire WNBA championship has been won on the basis of a missed shot-clock violation. There was an Aces-Mystics game where the busted shot clock had to be eschewed entirely and the public address announcer would just count down on every possession for the entire arena to hear. During the 2024 WNBA playoffs, the Fever lost a transition opportunity off a defensive rebound because the clock had been reset as if it were an offensive rebound. I have a funny memory of being in the press room after Sabrina Ionescu’s 2024 Finals Game 3 game-winner, one of the biggest shots in WNBA playoff history, when a group of reporters noticed that the time of the shot printed in the official game book was several seconds earlier than the actual time of the shot.
In the women’s sports liminal space, Delfosse’s rebound and putback attempt will join the 40 fake seconds that Canada and the U.S. had to play after the golden goal was scored in the 2021 women’s hockey world championships. The Michigan-Oregon play fits best, taxonomically, with a 2021 Mercury-Lynx game that Diana Taurasi won on a dramatic “buzzer-beater”—or what might have been a dramatic buzzer-beater but for the fact that the buzzer was never going to go off.
Matthew Knight Arena, it should be said, does not discriminate. During the Oregon men’s gritty season opener against Hawaii in November, everyone suffered through five clock stoppages in the first minute.
But enough about clocks. Led by the elite sophomore trio of Swords, Olivia Olson and Mila Holloway, stars who composed the highest-ranked recruiting class in program history, the No. 6 Wolverines, who won 92-87 in double OT, are—[Ed. note: This paragraph never happened. This blog is over.]
