Pat Fitzgerald’s first season at Michigan State was always going to be about rebuilding a program that has struggled to find stability. The coaching changes involving Mel Tucker and Jonathan Smith, with Harlon Barnett stepping in between, have left the Spartans with plenty of ground to make up. Turning that around requires more than a few good performances. Michigan State needs to start converting close games into wins, especially when opportunities to change the course of a game are hard to come by.

Against Illinois, the Spartans were trailing 31-24 with less than eight minutes remaining when Fitzgerald opted for an onside kick rather than wait for his defense to get another stop. Freshman Samson Gash appeared to give Michigan State exactly what it needed, racing down the sideline to recover the ball. With a chance to regain possession and potentially tie the game, the Spartans seemed to have found a way back into the contest. But the recovery soon became the center of a controversial officiating sequence, with Big Ten officials reversing one part of their ruling after replay while leaving the offside penalty against Michigan State intact.

Spartans Illustrated captured the confusion in a post on X. “The ruling is that Samson Gash was NOT inbounds on the onside kick recovery, which gives Illinois the ball at midfield instead of a re-kick,” it wrote. “BUT WAIT. Now the officials are saying that he IS inbounds, but the offsides still stands. MSU will kick the ball off again.”

The official who threw the flag had been involved in a remarkably similar onside-kick controversy two seasons earlier.

Replay officials first examined whether Samson Gash had recovered the kick in bounds. After a lengthy review, referee Mark Kluczynski announced that Gash was out of bounds. Under the ruling at that point, Illinois would take possession, with the applicable penalty for the out-of-bounds kickoff affecting where it would start its drive. But that wasn’t the end of it.

After another look at the footage, the officials reversed that part of the decision. Gash had been in bounds when he secured the ball. That meant Michigan State would get another opportunity to kick, with the five-yard penalty for the offside infraction still enforced. The distinction was that replay could correct the out-of-bounds ruling, but it could not overturn the offside flag. So, that penalty stayed put, denying Michigan State the recovery and forcing it to try again.

Illinois head coach Bret Bielema admitted he had been “in that ref’s ear a little bit” before the disputed kick. He had been arguing that Gash was offside and had also challenged another official over what he believed was a missed defensive holding call on Michigan State’s Kenny Soares Jr. in the first half. He even recalled telling officials to “just make it up,” though he stressed he wasn’t claiming that influenced the call.

Bielema was stunned by the reversal, saying, “I have never seen anything stop, tell us something, and then come back.”

Officials told him they found another camera angle. He joked about someone having “phoned a friend” before saying he trusted the Big Ten office and hoped they got it right. His comments captured the confusion surrounding the announcement, but there is no established evidence that his lobbying caused the officials to change their ruling. The crew’s stated explanation was that another camera angle had become available.

The television broadcast offered another reason to question the flag. Rules analyst Mike Pereira pointed out that Samson Gash appeared to be roughly half a yard behind the kicker when the ball was struck. If that positioning was correct, the offside ruling deserved a much closer look. Pereira explained why his initial impression changed after seeing the play again.

“When I saw it in real time, I thought he was because he was so far ahead of everybody else,” Pereira said. “But when the ball is kicked, he really hasn’t reached the line yet.”

The footage appeared to support Pereira’s assessment, but the crucial limitation was that the offside call could not be reviewed. The Big Ten later explained that the penalty was a non-reviewable judgment call, meaning officials could examine whether Gash recovered the ball in bounds without revisiting his position when the kick was made. FootballScoop’s Doug Samuels was not impressed by the officials’ handling of the sequence.

“This might be a first,” he posted on X. “Official comes out in MSU v ILLINOIS game to say one thing on the onside kick after review, then another angle becomes available and they change their mind.”

There is a more significant issue behind that frustration. In September 2024, Minnesota had a late onside-kick recovery wiped out by an offside flag against Matt Kingsbury during its game against Michigan. Keith Vaverchak, the umpire who flagged Gash against Illinois, had also thrown the flag on Kingsbury. Minnesota was trailing 27-24 after rallying from a 24-3 deficit, and the penalty ended its chance to regain possession with 1:37 remaining.

Two days later, the Big Ten told Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck that the play had been “too tight to flag.” The conference then received NCAA approval to change its officiating mechanics for onside kicks, positioning the line judge and head line judge on the kicking team’s restraining line to give officials a better view of potential violations. The league did not formally declare the original call incorrect, but the change was intended to improve the accuracy of future decisions. The Big Ten’s 2024 response was reported by CBS Minnesota.

That history makes the Michigan State incident more difficult to dismiss as an isolated controversy. However, there is an important distinction: the Big Ten said the officials were correctly positioned for a standard kickoff against Illinois because Michigan State used a surprise kick rather than a traditional onside-kick formation. The conference’s earlier adjustment therefore does not, by itself, establish that Vaverchak was improperly positioned or that the same officiating error occurred again.

The league also faced scrutiny earlier this season over an end-of-game replay involving Michigan and Western Michigan. Vaverchak was part of that officiating crew as well. The NCAA subsequently said instant-replay protocols had not been followed properly, and the Big Ten changed its policy to allow viewers to hear and see more of the discussions between replay officials and on-field referees during broadcasts. While that incident involved a different issue, it adds context to the questions surrounding the conference’s officiating and replay procedures.

The Illinois game also shows why the onside-kick ruling should not be treated as the sole explanation for Michigan State’s defeat. The penalty did not lead directly to Illinois points. The Spartans’ defense stopped the Illini on their ensuing possession, but Illinois ran 3:27 off the clock before turning the ball over on downs. Michigan State then tied the game on Jaziun Patterson’s two-yard touchdown run with 1:17 remaining, forcing overtime. Illinois eventually won 38-37 after stopping Michigan State’s two-point conversion attempt.

Fitzgerald remained adamant that the original call was wrong.

“The coaching point is to make sure you’re onside,” Fitzgerald said. “We were onside. We were not offsides. And so that is what it is.”

The Spartans’ recovery attempt was not an unusual tactic in itself. Ohio State used a similar short, deliberately placed kick against Maryland in 2019, allowing Chris Olave to race forward and recover the ball in stride. The strategy relies on timing: the kicking team’s players must remain behind the ball until it is kicked, then move quickly to reach it before the receiving team can secure possession. That makes accurate positioning particularly important, especially when the margin between being onside and offside can be difficult to judge in real time.

The onside kick was also described by observers as the fourth questionable call or no-call against Michigan State during the game. That doesn’t mean every disputed whistle was wrong, but the onside kick mess gave Spartans fans plenty more to gripe about.

The larger question for the Big Ten is whether its current procedures give officials the best possible chance to get these calls right. The conference has already changed how officials position themselves after a similar incident, yet the offside judgment remains outside replay review. Even if expanding review is not the answer, the league needs to explain how it evaluates these calls and whether its existing safeguards are sufficient.

Michigan State now moves on to a home matchup against Northwestern on Saturday, Oct. 17, before traveling to the Rose Bowl to face UCLA. The Spartans did recover from the disputed decision to force overtime, but the incident has renewed questions about whether a non-reviewable judgment call can have too much influence on a game, and whether the Big Ten has done enough to prevent another controversy of the same kind.