Norfolk State head coach Michael Vick called for a victory formation on Saturday, but his own players ignored him. Then they fumbled and lost the game, anyway.
Vick, a former NFL quarterback, was removing his headset in disgust as the Spartans — who were up five with 1:36 remaining — recovered a North Carolina Wolf Pack fumble, according to the New York Post.
Despite being in the lead, Spartans quarterback Deljay Bailey ignored his coach’s call, ran with the ball, and then fumbled it, allowing Norfolk to grab it. That led to a final score of 29-28 in favor of North Carolina. The disastrous turn around left Vick confused on just what the heck happened.
“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.”
The second-year coach, “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.”
The Spartans had one last chance to retake the lead as the clock ticked down, but Marco Peery missed a 37-yard field goal.
“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 game left Norfolk State with a 4-6 record on the season and 0-3 in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
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