Norfolk State head coach Mike Vick called for his offense to go into victory formation and kneel out the clock Saturday with the Spartans leading by five points and 1:36 left on the clock. His players did not listen.
Instead, quarterback Deljay Bailey ran the ball, fumbled, and watched North Carolina come away with the turnover. The Wolf Pack converted the mistake into a 29-28 win over the Spartans.
Norfolk State still had one more shot to retake the lead, but kicker Marco Peery missed a 37-yard field goal attempt as time wound down, sealing the loss.
Vick, a former NFL quarterback now in his second season leading the program, said he had already taken off his headset, believing the game was effectively over.
“I don’t know what happened at the end of the game,” Vick said, according to ProFootballTalk. “I put my headset down. I called victory formation. All we had to do was take a knee, kneel the clock out. That’s just situational football. I don’t know what happened in regards to that. I looked up, and we were running the ball, and then I saw the fumble.”
Vick noted that North Carolina had no timeouts remaining, meaning a simple kneel-down would have ended the game in Norfolk State’s favor.
“But my final instructions was victory formation. That’s when you kneel it out. And they had, I think, zero timeouts left and the game was over practically.”
He said the sequence would likely be studied by coaching staffs elsewhere as a cautionary example.
“People will look at that, and that’ll go on as a teaching tape for a lot of teams across the country for years to come,” Vick told reporters. “I hate it had to be us. But I called victory formation. I called victory formation, just letting everybody know that. I called victory.”
The loss dropped Norfolk State to 4-6 overall and 0-3 in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
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