It’s a Rams-Patriots Super Bowl, and an Officiating Nightmare/MMQB-Breer

LET’S ALSO APPRECIATE THE RAMS, BLOWN CALL OR NOT

Albert Breer

[www.si.com]

Again, the shame of the missed pass interference is what it overshadowed in the Superdome—a perfectly imperfect game that paid off so many of the bets that the Rams have made since arriving in Los Angeles.

Former first overall pick Jared Goff wasn’t off the charts but showed the kind of toughness that some have questioned in him. The trade of a first-round pick for receiver Brandin Cooks showed up in a game-changing 36-yard catch from Goff that set up the Rams’ first touchdown. Deals for corners Aqib Talib and Marcus Peters showed up in Saints star Michael Thomas’ quiet afternoon (four catches, 36 yards).

And the big swing in midseason for Dante Fowler—the Rams sent a third-round pick to the Jaguars to fill a big need, with no guarantee that Fowler would be back in 2019—cleared the fences at the biggest moment imaginable at the Superdome.

ORR: Perfectly imperfect Rams celebrate bizarre NFC championship

Post-seismic penalty, the Saints actually got the ball first in overtime. After a pass interference call gave them a first down, Aaron Donald dropped Mark Ingram for a six-yard loss. Then, on second-and-16, Fowler came screaming off the edge and forced Brees to pop the ball into the air—a ball that Rams safety John Johnson intercepted as he was falling backward onto his butt.

“The offensive lineman gave me a good set,” Fowler said over the phone, from the team plane. “And I went inside on him. And he rolled me, so I did a spin back outside, and I was able to get to Drew Brees, who’s still holding the ball. And he’s looking down the field, of course, trying to find somebody that’s open. He saw me last minute, and I was able to hit the ball and hit his arm, get the ball in the air.”

Johnson’s pick put the Rams at their own 46, and they only needed one first down from there to set up Greg Zuerlein’s 57-yard game-winner, which followed the 48-yarder he hit with 19 seconds left to send the game to OT in the first place.

And that illustrates how many hands were in the pot of this win for the Rams. Goff’s part in this act was obvious, and he had four receivers with at least four catches. One of those was Josh Reynolds (five touches, 90 yards), the ex-fourth-rounder replacing the injured Cooper Kupp, kind of like street free-agent pickup C.J. Anderson (16 carries, 44 yards) is grinding out the tough yards with Todd Gurley hobbled.

On defense, it was Donald, of course, but also those corners, and Ndamukong Suh and Fowler, and Johnson, and the list goes on.

Then, there’s McVay and his staff, who have done something that seems borderline impossible, and did it by taking a core that GM Les Snead helped to cultivate even before they arrived, and refining it to what he’s trying to do between the lines. And, course, there’s plenty more to McVay than just calling plays or building a roster.

“He’s a true leader and a genuine leader,” Fowler said. “He does it with lots of heart, because that’s who he is. He doesn’t [have to] even try. He loves the game of football so much. He can’t help it. He can’t hide it. He’s a great leader, a great coach. Great coach, a great situational coach.

“It’s kind of scary when you got a young guy like that just bringing a group of guys in, a group of vets in there, and changing the coaching and getting everyone to buy in. Especially grown professionals to buy in. And our main thing is, ‘We, not me.’”

In that we, there were a lot of risks taken. And a lot that look pretty smart now.

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The story this morning should be, would be, Rams coach Sean McVay taking a franchise that had missed the postseason 12 consecutive times to the Super Bowl in just his second year, and going right through the raucous Superdome to do it. The story this morning should be, would be, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s incomparable brilliance in the face of a worthy young challenger at Arrowhead.

But that’s not where we are on this Monday morning.

As has been the case, to a lesser degree, on other Monday mornings this year, you woke up today to more talk about a bad call in a football game. And you should. Because what happened in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday was as bad as it gets, the NFL’s worst nightmare come alive after a year in which the officials were criticized constantly. A terrible officiating failure cost a team a trip to the Super Bowl.

That’s no exaggeration either. There was 1:48 showing when Saints quarterback Drew Brees feathered the ball down the right sideline to Tommylee Lewis, who looked back for it, only to take a crushing head shot from Rams corner Nickell Robey-Coleman, who was on time for the hit like the Giants used to be on time for Tom Coughlin’s meetings: about five minutes early.

It was pass interference. It was helmet-to-helmet, too. And if the officials call it, the Saints have first-and-goal at the 5 with 1:45 left. From there, the Rams would have been forced to burn their final timeout, and the Saints could have bled the clock dry and kicked a field goal to win the game with no time left. Instead, they kicked the field goal with 1:41 remaining, leaving plenty of time for the Rams to tie the game, which they would.

We’ll get to the rest of the game—the Rams are deserving conference champions, to be clear—but somehow, the league managed to make a bad situation at that point even worse. Here’s how an exchange between referee Bill Vinovich, the head of the crew, and pool reporter Amie Just of NOLA.com went:

Q: What was the reasoning for no penalty flag being thrown on the play involving Drew Brees’ pass attempt to Tommylee Lewis?

BV: It’s a judgment call by the officials. I personally have not seen the play.

Q: You said you didn’t see the play, correct?

BV: Correct.

OK. This would be easier to swallow if it was 1985. Back then you couldn’t hand Vinovich a phone or an iPad to prepare him for this exchange. You can now, and the reason he was being made available was to answer questions on this particular call, so I have to assume that his not seeing the play before meeting with Just was willful. Either that, or the league folks on hand didn’t properly prepare Vinovich.

BASKIN: Saints left in a state of disbelief after missed pass interference ends their magical season

So we’re back in another spot where the NFL, in the face of something controversial, was feigning ignorance, and the only explanation is that this was a delay tactic (to afford time for everyone to get their story straight) or just plain dumb by the league. Neither conclusion is great, either from an optics standpoint or for the public’s trust in the NFL to do the right thing.

Someone needed to fall on the sword immediately. Instead, what we got was a phone call with Sean Payton, and reports that the league was really sorry. What actually is sorry here is how this was handled, taking simple human error and metastasizing the problem by—and this is something we’ve seen over and over and over again—attempting to manage an issue rather than just confronting it.

The upshot? Generally, once the PR hit comes, the league will react. And so I’d expect some reform. My hope is that they follow Bill Belichick’s idea to make all plays reviewable, and modernize how the replay system works by using technology to streamline it (and maybe take it off the field). It would certainly have been nice to have that system in place on Sunday.

MORE: The biggest officiating controversies of Championship weekend

Instead, the NFL is back in a familiar place.

I did reach out Sunday night to try to get officiating czar Al Riveron on the phone, and I didn’t hear back. Whatever he would have said, though, probably wouldn’t change my opinion much.

Alright, now I’ll climb off the soapbox and look at Sunday.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2019 05:02AM by RamBill.