Iowa’s stunning last-second touchdown against Michigan came with a major dose of danger attached.
The ending that actually counted began with Addison Ostrenga hauling in a deflected catch over the middle and pushing the Hawkeyes to the 16-yard line. That first down stopped the clock and sent Iowa sprinting to the line.
The offense got set, the ball was snapped, and then the whistles blew the play dead. In the chaos, the clock showed exactly two seconds remaining.
That mattered because NCAA rules prohibit a spike with fewer than three seconds left, a restriction put in place by a 2013 rule change. CBS analyst Charles Davis recognized the situation immediately.
"I don't know that you can [spike it] at that stage," Davis said.
He added a moment later:
"He wasn't going to spike it. It looked like he was going to fake it and run a play."
What Hank Brown was actually planning remains unclear. If he had tried a true spike there, it would have been a catastrophic mistake and one of the most memorable game-management blunders anyone could point to.
Brown did carry out the motions of a fake spike, though. At the snap, a couple of Iowa linemen got into pass protection, and Ostrenga started to release downfield, but the whistle had already killed the action.
Brown didn’t directly confirm whether a spike was ever the plan, but he did say Iowa was prepared for the moment.
"I think it [the stoppage] helped a ton," Brown said. Just being able to huddle up and talk to what we're going to do now. Whether he would have went down or not, I think we prepared for that point in the field of what we're going to do," Brown said.
Iowa also caught a break when Daley went down, leaving Michigan’s top pass rusher out of the final snap.
If Brown had actually pulled off a fake spike and hit the end zone, it would have joined the short list of famous plays of that kind. Josh Rosen did it for UCLA against Texas A&M in 2017, and Western Michigan used a fake spike against Toledo in 2020. The gold standard, though, remains Dan Marino’s fake spike against the Jets three decades ago, when he turned the move into a game-winning touchdown.
In the end, Iowa didn’t need that kind of trickery. The play that stood will belong to Reese Vander Zee, and the Hawkeyes got the finish they needed.
"We're just trying to get everybody in the end zone and just give somebody a chance,"
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