COVER/PAGE DESIGN BY ALEX STONE
Scott Sypniewski cried. He sobbed, actually. He was in the visitor’s
locker room at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington, still in uniform.
His hand grasped John Baxter’s, his head resting on his coordinator’s
shoulder.
It has been four years exactly from that day to the publication
of this story. Sypniewski works now in Chicago as a recruiting
coordinator for NCSA, a company that helps high school athletes
boost their recruiting profiles. It has been two years since he
graduate transferred from Michigan to Vanderbilt, over a year since
his last NFL tryout with the Jacksonville Jaguars ended without a
callback. He is living his life, normal and anonymous, as far removed
from that snap — the snap — against Michigan State and the world
encompassing it as could be.
And still, when Sypniewski tells the story of all that led to that
moment at Indiana, when everything poured out of him, he gets
choked up.
Minutes before going to the locker room, as Delano Hill broke up
a fourth-down attempt in the end zone and the rest of Michigan’s
football team converged around him, Sypniewski was celebrating,
too. His hands flew in the air in elation. He lifted his head and turned
to walk off the field. Then he saw his father. He’s always been good at
finding his family in the crowd, he says now.
“I saw him shaking his head,” Sypniewski said. “And he was starting
to cry.”
That was when Sypniewski ran up the tunnel, into the visitor’s
locker room and started sobbing.
Sypniewski cried then because of the emotions of the four
weeks preceding that moment, because everything that
bubbles beneath the surface of any athlete finally burst, and
because for him — in those four weeks — that load exceeded
its capacity. He gets choked up now when he tells the story
because even in relative anonymity, four years after the
fact, those emotions never quite left. When one error
defines you, it stays with you.
As for that error, the clip has been played thousands of
times over. You’ve seen it. You’ll see it again this weekend.
There are 10 seconds left in the game, it’s fourth-and-two
and Michigan leads, 23-21. Sypniewski is right there in the
center, holding onto the ball, his head looking between his
legs, readying for a motion he had done thousands of times
before.
Instead of hitting the strike zone, the football wavers and
dips. Blake O’Neill drops it, bends down, tries to pick it up.
Sean McDonough’s voice goes up an octave. Jalen Watts-
Jackson, a Michigan State safety, runs the ball into the end
zone as time expires. Michigan loses in impossible fashion to
a hated rival.
Sypniewski, to be clear, was not universally blamed. Unlike
O’Neill, who spent the following week as the face of the error,
getting vitriol heaped on his social media, Sypniewski lived
with the anonymity of a long snapper. In a way, that made all
that happened over the next month that much harder. The
blame he had to get past was not that of others, but his own.
Four years later, past a football career and well into living
real life with a real job, he’s asked how long it took to
move on.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t
know. I don’t think I have an answer to that.
“Maybe I’ll let you know in like five years?”
***
Sypniewski didn’t think his grandfather
would be able to watch him play football
at Michigan. And yet, after making it
to every high school game, he was at
nearly every college home game, too.
“My grandpa basically lived to watch me play,” Sypniewski said.
Which meant that when Sypniewski exited the locker room the night
of the 2015 Michigan State game and walked back to his family — at a
tailgate put on by a group of parents — his grandpa was there.
All the faces at the tailgate were expressionless. It was less than an
hour after the end of the game — nobody knew what to say or how to
talk about what had happened. “It wasn’t … the best physical tailgate
to be in,” said Andrew Robinson, Sypniewski’s friend and a backup
long snapper on the 2015 team.
Sypniewski’s grandfather pulled him out of the tailgate and sat him
down. Along with Sypniewski’s father, he stressed that Scott couldn’t
dwell on this and had to move forward. The kinds of cliches that
people always fall back on, in the kind of situation where it’s hard to
apply them.
“He was definitely someone who was right there, putting his
arm around my shoulder and telling me it’s gonna be OK, really,”
Sypniewski said. “And then my dad. My dad’s been through a lot of
crap, too. He kinda knows that you can’t dwell on it. Just gotta keep
moving forward. You can’t even think about it. Even though it gets
brought up every time someone recognizes me.”
Sypniewski’s path to that moment came with good luck at every turn.
His father played for Western Michigan in the 1980s, for a coaching
staff that included Brady Hoke, Greg Mattison and Dan Ferrigno —
all Michigan coaches when he was a recruit. When it became clear
Sypniewski was good enough to be a long snapper in college, he
could only get a preferred walk-on offer from the Broncos. He visited
Hoke expecting the same and almost broke down crying when a full
scholarship was offered. On the car ride home, Sypniewski made his
dad pull over so he could call Hoke and commit.
When Jim Harbaugh took over the program in Sypniewski’s redshirt
freshman year, he didn’t just keep the starting job he was in line
for, but he retained his scholarship. Within a tight-knit group of
specialists, Sypniewski was viewed as a leader.
“He’s a good guy, really likable guy,” said Kyle Seychel, a walk-on who
played on special teams from 2014-17. “And I just looked up I guess. I
guess that’s the impression. I still have that to this day.”
Those strokes of luck in his recruitment inform his career now.
NCSA, the company Sypniewski works for, is essentially a college
counseling service for recruits. He used it himself in high school
when trying to get noticed as a long snapper, a position where lack
of recognition tends to be inherent. It’s a job that allows him to stay
near sports while, generally, avoiding the spotlight that can come
with being at the center of disaster.
Sypniewski, though, wants to clarify what happened and his role in
all of it.
When Baxter, Sypniewski and O’Neill watched the tape of the
botched snap after the season, having avoided it until then, they
noticed O’Neill looked like he was lined up further back than normal.
They rewound and watched again, counting the yards. “Probably did
it like 30 times,” Sypniewski said. O’Neill had been taught to line up
15 yards behind Sypniewski. When Michigan lined up to punt with
10 seconds left against Michigan State, O’Neill was 17 yards behind
Sypniewski. The ball dipped because it was snapped to 15.
“That’s usually one of the things that I tell people when people ask
me, is that, well first off, you can’t say — I don’t want to put anyone
in the ground here,” Sypniewski said. “But that was one of the things
why I wanted to kind of tell my story about it, from my perspective.”
O’Neill declined to talk for this story when contacted through
Sypniewski and didn’t respond to a direct message. Baxter, through a
USC spokesperson, declined to talk as well.
Seychel pulls up the video while on the phone to verify, having not
seen it in a while. He, too, counts the yards. “Oh yeah. That’s right,”
he says. “Right at his feet. I’m sorry, man. I haven’t seen this play in a
while. … I try not to think about it.
“... If he was standing at 14 yards, it might have been right at his
chest.”
Sypniewski, on top of the snap itself, broke his thumb against the
Spartans. Because that game was followed by a bye week, he didn’t
miss any time, playing the next game against Minnesota. The
following week, against Rutgers, he was running downfield and got
decleated. The hit ruptured the bursa sac in his right knee. It swelled,
then got infected.
He spent the week leading up to the Indiana game with a 103-degree
fever, not practicing. His roommates, Robinson and Kenny Allen, had
to stay at the Campus Inn until the team left. Harbaugh didn’t let
Sypniewski travel to Bloomington with the team, but he told him he
could play if he could get to the game. So Sypniewski’s parents drove
up to Ann Arbor from Chicago on Friday morning, then drove him to
Bloomington. He stayed in his own hotel room.
The morning of the game, Sypniewski dressed, keeping Harbaugh
to his word. When he went out for warmups, he had to run back to
the bench on the first field goal snap, Robinson recalled, “because
he thought he was gonna throw up on the ball.” Still, he played. And
when Michigan won, he cried.
“I couldn’t control any emotions,” Sypniewski said, “and it was kind
of like collective part of everything that happened from the Michigan
State game to then. All of it was just coming out and the fact that
we won, I was finally done, I could just go home. That season, that
stretch of four games, it really tested who I was.”
***
Twenty minutes after saying he doesn’t know how long it took to
move on, Sypniewski claims he’s done so. Certainly, he seems to be
over playing football.
He tried to catch on in the NFL after his year at Vanderbilt, but
decided after a year he couldn’t keep sitting by his phone every
Monday and Tuesday, waiting for a call. If something comes out of
the sky, he’s game, but Sypniewksi wanted to start his next career.
He notices when the snap gets played on TV, but says he’s past it.
When people bring it up, he goes to the same joke — “How many
times were you the number one play of the year on the ESPYs?” When
SportsCenter played it every hour on the play’s four-year anniversary
last month and people around his office joked with him, Sypniewski
took it in stride.
“Obviously you think about it every time it gets played on TV, you
kind of put yourself back in that place, cause you know exactly what
was going through your head when you were doing it,” Sypniewski
said. “To say that I still dwell on it, that’s not true at all.
“It’s over.”
Yet, he wants his perspective out there, wants people to understand
the play was more than a 15-second video to be looped and a meme
to be shared. On a given day, Robinson estimated, Michigan could
have three practice periods devoted to special teams with about 30
minutes a week devoted to punts. About three times a week, Michigan
would practice against punt block looks like the one Michigan State
broke out on that fourth down.
None of that, of course, accounts for the work Sypniewski and others
did on the sidelines as the offense and defense practiced. None of it
accounts for the minutiae that goes into long snapping, the thousands
of reps and the sheer bad luck it takes for a mistake to occur in that
moment. None of it accounts for the next week, either, when Michigan
installed an emergency punt for a similar situation, where the punter
stood a yard up, caught the ball and one-step kicked it.
Amid a conversation touching on all the minutiae of everything that
happened four years ago, Sypniewski finds a moment to talk about
moving forward, keeping a short memory. He laughs.
Those 10 seconds led to tears in Bloomington and years of reminders.
They will stay in the memory of Sypniewski, and Michigan, for years
to come.
“It’s crazy that something like that was only 10 seconds long,” he says,
“but that’s what people remember.”
ETHAN SEARS / MANAGING SPORTS EDITOR
FOUR YEARS LATER, SCOTT SYPNIEWSKI
WANTS TO GET PAST HIS MOMENT
4B
5B
TheMichiganDaily, www.michigandaily.com
FootballSaturday, November 15, 2019