Michael David Smith ,
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Referee Clete Blakeman is having a bad game today in Germany.
Blakeman botched the Falcons-Colts overtime coin toss, declaring Indianapolis the visiting team and allowing the Colts to choose heads or tails. The Colts won the toss and elected to receive.
One problem: The Colts are not the visiting team. The Colts are designated as the home team in Berlin. The Falcons are the visiting team.
While NFL Network was on a commercial, the league fixed the mistake, re-did the coin toss, and this time the Falcons won the toss and received. Viewers at home didn’t see the coin toss that actually counted.
Blakeman had already screwed up at the end of the fourth quarter, with regulation ending on a Falcons intentional grounding penalty. Blakeman announced that there was a 10-second runoff that would end the game (actually there were 11 seconds left), he announced that the Falcons had no timeouts so they couldn’t avoid the runoff (actually the Falcons did have two timeouts left), and he announced that the game was over (actually the fourth quarter was over but the game was still on). That mistake didn’t matter much because the Falcons chose not to use their timeout and let the fourth quarter lapse, but it was still an error an NFL referee shouldn’t make.
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