ACC suspends officials two games after Miami-Duke ending

The Atlantic Coast Conference threw some penalty flags of its own Sunday, suspending the officiating crew that worked the Miami-Duke game for two league contests after finding they committed “a series of errors” that allowed the Hurricanes to score a wild last-play touchdown and pull out a win.

The ACC said the crew committed four errors on that play, the most grievous being not seeing Miami running back Mark Walton’s knee was down as he threw one of the eight laterals the Hurricanes used on their desperate kickoff return. If that was noticed, Duke would have prevailed since no time was left on the clock.

Per league rule, the outcome — Miami 30, Duke 27 — cannot be overturned.

“At the end of the day, we got the win,” Miami’s Corn Elder, who took the final lateral 91 yards for the winning score, said Sunday. “So no matter what they say, we won.”

That surely wasn’t Duke’s opinion, nor was it that of the ACC.

“Unfortunately, there is no mechanism that I know of in place to reverse an outcome of a game,” Duke coach David Cutcliffe said. “I do believe that there should be. ... What instant replay is in place for is to get it right. And we did not get it right.”

The on-field crew members — referee Jerry Magallanes, umpire Terrence Ramsay, linesman Mike Owens, line judge Jim Slayton, back judge Robert Luklan, field judge Bill Dolbow, side judge Michael McCarthy and center judge Tracy Lynch — got two-game bans, as did the game’s replay official and communicator.

In addition to not seeing that Walton was down, the ACC said the crew also missed a block in the back, erred in how they waved off an erroneous penalty call and should have penalized Miami’s Rashawn Scott for running from the sideline onto the field in celebration before the play was over. None of those three events would have ended the game, but had Walton been ruled down correctly, all that would have been moot.

“I knew I was going down, so I was just trying to throw the ball back,” Walton said. “The referee made a good call.”