Wake Forest field goal sails wide left by just an extraordinary distance

In college football, this happens from time to time:

That kick by Wake Forest’s Mike Weaver missed the uprights by the widest longitude of any field goal attempt I’ve seen this year. Part of the fun of this sport is that special teams play is always unreliable, but this miss is practically in a league of its own.

The professionals do this occasionally, though you don’t see NFL kicks missing by that kind of east-west distance more than a few times a decade. We’re talking “Mike Vanderjagt in the 2005 playoffs against the Steelers” types of misses here, even though a kick like that’s not quite as extremely wide as this one was.

I want to put this Wake Forest miss in some visual context:

The end zone’s about 53 yards wide and the uprights are 18 feet, six inches apart on the inside. I’m just eyeballing this, but it looks like that kick is a solid 17-or-so yards wide left, a little more than halfway between the left upright and the sideline. That is very wide, given that the ball wasn’t just shanked off the foot. It actually traveled airborne for quite a while, though it was doomed from the start.

Clemson’s lead was 28-0 by a few minutes into the fourth quarter.