September 04, 2019 at 08:42PM
Elizabeth Scott didn't know what hit her — quite literally.
As a member of the Louisville Ladybirds dance team, she was standing on the sideline at Cardinal Stadium on Monday night when Notre Dame quarterback Ian Book felt Louisville's pressure coming. It was first-and-10 in the fourth quarter and the Fighting Irish were up by 18, so Book threw the ball away.
Although Scott was facing the direction of the play, she said she had her eye on the game clock and was actually watching the play unfold on the big screen. Suddenly, she heard her teammates and the people around her shouting.
"They're like, 'Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!'" Scott told For The Win by phone Tuesday. "So I turn, because even when people tell you to watch out, your natural instinct is to turn in the direction they're yelling at. So I turn to look, and as soon as I turned, it hit me right in the face. I didn't even get to see the football."
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Scott — a junior from New Albany, Indiana, which is just across the Ohio River from the city of Louisville — immediately dropped her poms and turned away, grabbing her nose. She said when she did, she could feel it was crooked and, understandably scared, she began crying.
After meeting with trainers at the stadium and experiencing only a little bleeding, her dad, who was at the game sitting in the second row, took her to the emergency room. There, she learned that Book's throwaway pass did, in fact, break her nose. Although she said she needs to see a specialist for her unexpected injury, doctors told her to be optimistic that her nose won't be crooked for the rest of her life.
And following Notre Dame's 35-17 win over Louisville, the Fighting Irish quarterback felt terrible and sent Scott a message on Instagram to apologize.
"I messaged him back, and I was like, 'All is good, that's not your fault,'" she said laughing. "'Like, how are you supposed to know the ball's going to go directly into my face? That's not your fault.'"
At this point, all Scott can really do is laugh, especially after video of the rogue football breaking her nose went viral. She's since joined in with the jokes at her own expense - made easier by the fact that she said she's surprisingly not in any pain.
"I've never liked my nose anyways," she wrote on one Instagram post (pictured on the right).
"Personally, I'd much rather make jokes about it and be light-hearted about it and make it a fun experience rather than dwell on the fact that my nose is crooked," she said.
"When you go and stand on the sideline at football games, it's a risk. Anything can happen. I don't have any anger about the situation or anything."
Now in her third year on the dance team, Scott said nothing like this has ever happened to her at a football or basketball game. Particularly for football, she said she and her teammates are often aware of their surroundings, but they're mostly on the lookout for camera crews or players running at full speed out of bounds. They're not looking up for errant footballs.
With countless people commenting on her viral video, Scott said it's bizarre to have so many strangers talking about the moment she broke her nose. Many people are wondering why she didn't just catch the ball, which she acknowledged would have been an awful challenge even if she had her eye on it.
"It's weird when people are like, 'She should have caught it,'" Scott said. "Because I'm like, 'Do you honestly think I could have caught that?' Like what? I've never played football a day in my life. That was a pretty high throw. It wasn't just like 10 yards or something. In my opinion, even if I had caught that, I would have had such bad chest pains and that would have hurt.
"But my eyes were not even in that direction, so I had no idea it was even coming for me."
