Mike Florio ,
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To have any true credibility, NFL officiating must have transparency. Ideally, someone from the league would be available to the media every week to answer any/all questions about calls made and not made in the prior weekend of games.
For now, the NFL puts Walt Anderson on NFL Network every Sunday morning to address one or two hand-picked officiating decisions from the seven preceding days.
It’s better than nothing, but it’s still closer to nothing than enough.
Equally important in transparency is candor. On Sunday, Anderson acknowledged that the officials erred when calling a key intentional grounding penalty on Washington late in last Sunday night’s Broncos-Commanders game.
Said NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay immediately after the call was made: “This is absolutely not grounding. [Quarterback Marcus Mariota] throws it over the head of No. 17, who is outside the numbers. By rule, that is not intentional grounding.”
The rules back up McAulay’s interpretation . If the quarterback throws the ball in the direction of a receiver who is outside the numbers, it doesn’t matter it he overthrows the receiver. In theory, the quarterback could throw the ball out of the stadium and it wouldn’t be grounding.
On Sunday, Anderson agreed that the officials made a mistake.
“It wasn’t intentional grounding,” Anderson said. “There’s a lot of different aspects to intentional grounding. So, you’ve got to determine first, was the quarterback in or out of the pocket? Where did he throw the football? Did it get past the line of scrimmage? All of those factors have to come into play.
“And some of them, we can help with replay, but some of them will not. So you can see the underlay, which is defining the pocket. The quarterback, he does not quite get out of the pocket, so he’s now got to throw the ball in the direction of a receiver, which it does. It goes right over number 17, McLaurin’s head, but unfortunately, the officials did not feel that the player was outside the number. That’s not something that replay can help with. We can help with in or out of the pocket, but we can’t help with the position of a player relative to being inside or outside the numbers, and that’s the part of the rule that’s critical, that would have been able for replay to be able to make that not a foul.”
Anderson then expressed hope that the rules will be tweaked to allow for the use of replay review on that specific point — whether the receiver was outside the number.
Unfortunately, that’s how the replay rules typically change. The league experiences a clear example of where it would have been useful, and then the league expands the rules to make it reviewable moving forward.
It’s not an ideal way to do business. In lieu of imagining every situation in which it could be helpful to make replay review available proactively, the league reacts to situations in which it learns what it already should have known.
And if the flag had been picked up (as it should have been), the Commanders would have an enhanced chance to avoid overtime by scoring a game-winning touchdown, in lieu of a game-tying field goal.
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