A Disastrous Punt Attempt From The Citadel Gave South Florida The Easiest Touchdown Possible

College football is back, and in the year 2020 it comes with stadiums catching on fire and a lot of wonky play from under-practiced and understaffed teams getting live action for the first time. The result has been a lot of helter skelter and funny videos circulating on social media, but none have topped what happened between The Citadel and South Florida on Saturday evening.

Midway through the second quarter, with The Citadel trailing 7-0 and backed up in their own end zone, a punt went about as poorly as it could possibly go. It’s been a while since we’ve all watched football, so let’s go through all the bad things that can possibly happen here and what they’re worth. The punter can fumble, or maybe the snap goes over his head and the ball goes out of the end zone for a safety. That’s only two points, though, and things could be worse if South Florida gets their hands on the ball or recovers it in the end zone.

But none of that happened, in fact. What did happen, though, is the punter bobbled the snap, panicked, tried to evade tacklers and managed to get off a punt in name only, which was immediately caught for a South Florida touchdown. If that sounds improbable, fine. But it happened, and we have the video proof you’re going to need to be a believer. Let’s first visit this on the macro level, with the truly dystopian view of an empty Raymond James Stadium and a mask-wearing official watching all this go down.

And now we need to zoom in a bit and really focus on the fine details. The look of absolute panic on the face of the punter. The defender’s joyous reaction to a punt that traveled a few short yard in the air but, on the stat sheet, carried a total -10 yards and was immediately returned for a zero-yard touchdown.

It’s glorious, and in what will almost certainly be a messy, chaotic year of college football it still seems improbable that a punting disaster tops this one. There’s plenty of time, but the bar is officially sky high.