Most shocking sports moment you've covered?

NCAA men's basketball tourney opener @ Vanderbilt, Middle Tennessee vs. Kentucky.

The committee set it up so that Kentucky would have to play Louisville in the second round.

Instead, Middle Tennessee wins 50-44. The most shocked expressions were on the faces of the Louisville kids watching from the stands.

 

Late 1990s, first round of the state high school football playoffs, one of our local teams has the No. 1 seed after a 10-0 regular season during which they beat the daylights out of everyone they played. Two reasonably close games out of 10. Two Division I recruits on the team and numerous decent Division II players.

They lost at home against in the first round of the playoffs to the No. 16 seed -- a team that nobody in the state really knew much about. They snuck into the last playoff spot with a win in the final week of the regular season. Hometown team was devastated. They were crying like babies -- like that kid that fumbled the ball at the end of the big game in All The Right Moves because Craig T. Nelson didn't have the QB take a knee. People in the stands were crying. The coach was crying.

There are some places -- and this was one of them -- where high school sports bind the community together. People were numb around there for a week or two after that. It was a little awkward in the postgame, but I almost got the sense they were glad someone was there to let them talk about how devastated they were. No one big mistake that cost them, they just got outplayed.

 

I have posted a lot about this in the past:
Hank Gathers ...

 

Bobby Tomasello.